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tE^e KiijewiDc iLiteratuw ^etits 

A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL 

MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE 

A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER 

BY 

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

u 

/ 

WITH NOTES 




HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 

Boston: 4 Park Street; New York: 86 Fifth Avenue 
Chicago : S7S-388 Wabash Avenue 



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i 5 Z36^ 
CONTENTS ' . ^'y^ 



Page 

A MoosEHEAD Journal 1 

My Garden Acquaintance 43 

A Good Word for Winter 73 

Notes Ill 



UBBKRYofOONdRESS 
Two Copies ffeceive4 
MAR 2 \d07 

(. «««rrtfW Eirtnr 

9U^ A m^t Hi 



YB, 



COPYRIGHT 1871 BY JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

COPYRIGHT 1S99 BY MABEL LOWELL BURNETT 

COPYRIGHT 1902 AND I907 BY HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO. 



ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 



A MOOSEHEAD JOUKNAL 



A MOOSEHEAD JOUKNAL 

1853 

ADDRESSED TO THE EDELMANN STORG AT THE BAGNI DI 
LUCCA. 

Thursday, 11th August. — I knew as little yes- 
terday of the interior of Maine as tlie least pene- 
trating person knows of the inside of that great 
social millstone which, driven by the river Time, 
sets imperatively agoing the several wheels of our 
individual activities. Born while Maine was still 
a province of native Massachusetts, I was as much 
a foreigner to it as yourself, my dear Storg. I had 
seen many lakes, ranging from that of Virgil's 
Cumaean to that of Scott's Caledonian Lady ; but 
Moosehead, within two days of me, had never en- 
joyed the profit of being mirrored in my retina. 
At the sound of the name, no reminiscential atoms 
(according to Kenelm Digby's Theory of Associ- 
ation, — as good as any) stirred and marshalled 
themselves in my brain. The truth is, we think 
lightly of Nature's penny shows, and estimate what 
we see by the cost of the ticket. Empedocles gave 



2 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL 

his life for a pit-entrance to ^tna, and no doubt 
found his account in it. Accordingly, the clean 
face of Cousin Bull is imaged patronizingly in 
Lake George, and Loch Lomond glasses the hur- 
ried countenance of Jonathan, diving deeper in the 
streams of European association (and coming up 
drier) than any other man. Or is the cause of our 
not caring to see what is equally within the reach 
of aU our neighbors to be sought in that aristo- 
cratic principle so deeply implanted in human 
nature ? I knew a pauper graduate who always 
borrowed a black coat, and came to eat the Com- 
mencement dinner, — not that it was better than 
the one which daily graced the board of the pub- 
lic institution in which he hibernated (so to speak) 
during the other three hundred and sixty-four 
days of the year, save in this one particular, that 
none of his eleemosynary fellow-commoners could 
eat it. If there are unhappy men who wish that 
they were as the Babe Unborn, there are more who 
would aspire to the lonely distinction of being that 
other figurative personage, the Oldest Inhabitant. 
You remember the charming irresolution of our 
dear Esthwaite, (like Macheath between his two 
doxies,) divided between his theory that he is un- 
der thirty, and his pride at being the only one of 
us who witnessed the September gale and the re- 
joicings at the Peace ? Nineteen years ago I was 
walking through the Franconia Notch, and stopped 
to chat with a hermit, who fed with gradual logs the 
unwearied teeth of a saw-mill. As the strident steel 
slit off the slabs of the log, so did the less willing 



A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL 3 

machine of talk, acquiring a steadier up-and-down 
motion, pare away that outward bark of conversa- 
tion which protects the core, and which, like other 
bark, has naturally most to do with the weather, 
the season, and the heat of the day. At length I 
asked him the best point of view for the Old Man 
of the Mountain. 

" Dunno, — never see it." 

Too young and too happy either to feel or affect 
the Horatian indifference, I was sincerely aston- 
ished, and I expressed it. 

The log-compelling man attempted no justifi- 
cation, but after a little asked, " Come from 
Baws'n?'' 

" Yes " (with peninsular pride). 

" Goodie to see in the vycinity o' Baws'n." 

" Oh, yes ! '* I said ; and I thought, — see Bos- 
ton and die ! see the State-Houses, old and new, 
the caterpillar wooden bridges crawling with innu- 
merable legs across the flats of Charles ; see the 
Common, — largest park, doubtless, in the world, 
— with its files of trees planted as if by a drill- 
sergeant, and then for your nunc dimittis ! 

" I should like, 'awl, I should like to stan' on 
Bunker Hill. You 've ben there off en, likely ? " 

" N-o-o," unwillingly, seeing the little end of 
the horn in clear vision at the terminus of this 
Socratic perspective. 

" 'Awl, my young frien', you 've larned neow 
thet wut a man kin see any day for nawthin', chil- 
dern haff price, he never doos see. Nawthin' pay, 
nawthin' vally." 



4 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL 

With this modern instance of a wise saw, I de- 
parted, deeply revolving these things with myself, 
and convinced that, whatever the ratio of popula- 
tion, the average amount of human nature to the 
square mile differs little the world over. I thought 
of it when I saw people upon the Pincian wonder- 
ing at the alchemist sun, as if he never burned 
the leaden clouds to gold in sight of Charles 
Street. I thought of it when I found eyes first 
discovering at Mont Blanc how beautiful snow was. 
As I walked on, I said to myself, There is one 
exception, wise hermit, — it is just these gratis 
pictures which the poet puts in his show-box, and 
which we all gladly pay Wordsworth and the rest 
for a peep at. The divine faculty is to see what 
everybody can look at. 

While every well-informed man in Europe, from 
the barber down to the diplomatist, has his view of 
the Eastern Question, why should I not go person- 
ally down East and see for myseK? Why not, 
like Tancred, attempt my own solution of the 
Mystery of the Orient, — doubly mysterious when 
you begin the two words with capitals? You know 
my way of doing things, to let them simmer in my 
mind gently for months, and at last do them im- 
promptu in a kind of desperation, driven by the 
Eumenides of unfulfilled purpose. So, after talk- 
ing about Moosehead till nobody believed me capa- 
ble of going thither, I found myself at the Eastern 
Railway station. The only event of the journey 
hither (I am now at Waterville) was a boy hawk- 
ing exhilaratingly the last great railroad smash, — 



A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL 6 

thirteen lives lost, — and no doubt devoutly wish- 
ing there had been fifty. This having a mercantile 
interest in horrors, holding stock, as it were, in 
murder, misfortune, and pestilence, must have an 
odd effect on the human mind. The birds of ill- 
omen, at whose sombre flight the rest of the world 
turn pale, are the ravens which bring food to this 
little outcast in the wilderness. If this lad give 
thanks for daily bread, it would be curious to 
inquire what that phrase represents to his under- 
standing. If there ever be a plum in it, it is Sin 
or Death that puts it in. Other details of my 
dreadful ride I will spare you. Suffice it that I 
arrived here in safety, — in complexion like an 
Ethiopian serenader half got-up, and so broiled 
and peppered that I was more like a devilled kid- 
ney than anything else I can think of. 

10 P. M. — The civil landlord and neat chamber 
at the " Elm wood House " were very grateful, and 
after tea I set forth to explore the town. It has 
a good chance of being pretty: but, like most 
American towns, it is in a hobbledehoy age, grow- 
ing yet, and one cannot tell what may happen. A 
child with great promise of beauty is often spoiled 
by its second teeth. There is something agreeable 
in the sense of completeness which a waUed town 
gives one. It is entire, like a crystal, — a work 
which man has succeeded in finishing. I think 
the human mind pines more or less where every- 
thing is new, and is better for a diet of stale bread. 
The number of Americans who visit the Old World, 
and the deep inspirations with which they breathe 



6 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL 

the air of antiquity, as if their mental lungs had 
been starved with too thin an atmosphere, is be- 
ginning to afford matter of speculation to obser- 
vant Europeans. For my own part, I never saw a 
house which I thought old enough to be torn down. 
It is too like that Scythian fashion of knocking old 
people on the head. I cannot help thinking that 
the indefinable something which we call character 
is cumulative, — that the influence of the same 
climate, scenery, and associations for several gen- 
erations is necessary to its gathering head, and that 
the process is disturbed by continual change of 
place. The American is nomadic in religion, in 
ideas, in morals, and leaves his faith and opinions 
with as much indifference as the house in which he 
was born. However, v/e need not bother : Nature 
takes care not to leave out of the great heart of 
society either of its two ventricles of hold-back and 
go-ahead. 

It seems as if every considerable American town 
must have its one specimen of everything, and so 
there is a college in Waterville, the buildings of 
which are three in number, of brick, and quite up 
to the average ugliness which seems essential in 
edifices of this description. Unhappily, they do 
not reach that extreme of ugliness where it and 
beauty come together in the clasp of fascination. 
We erect handsomer factories for cottons, woollens, 
and steam-engines, than for doctors, lawyers, and 
parsons. The truth is, that, till our struggle with 
nature is over, till this shaggy hemisphere is tamed 
and subjugated, the workshop wiU be the college 



A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL 7 

whose degrees will be most valued. Moreover, 
steam has made travel so easy that the great uni- 
versity of the world is open to all comers, and the 
old cloister system is falling astern. Perhaps it is 
only the more needed, and, were I rich, I should 
like to found a few lazyships in my Alma Mater as 
a kind of counterpoise. The Anglo-Saxon race 
has accepted the primal curse as a blessing, has 
deified work, and would not have thanked Adam 
for abstaining from the apple. They would have 
dammed the four rivers of Paradise, substituted 
cotton for fig-leaves among the antediluvian popu- 
lations, and commended man's first disobedience as 
a wise measure of political economy. But to re- 
turn to our college. We cannot have fine buildings 
till we are less in a hurry. We snatch an educa- 
tion like a meal at a railroad-station. Just in time 
to make us dyspeptic, the whistle shrieks, and we 
must rush, or lose our places in the great train of 
life. Yet noble architecture is one element of 
patriotism, and an eminent one of culture, the finer 
portions of which are taken in by unconscious ab- 
sorption through the pores of the mind from the 
surrounding atmosphere. I suppose we must wait, 
for we are a great bivouac as yet, rather than a na- 
tion on the march from the Atlantic to the Pacific, 
and pitch tents instead of building houses. Our 
very villages seem to be in motion, following west- 
ward the bewitching music of some Pied Piper of 
Hamelin. We still feel the great push toward 
sundown given to the peoples somewhere in the 
gray dawn of history. The cliff-swallow alone o£ 
all animated nature emigrates eastward. 



8 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL 

Friday^ 12th. — The coach leaves Waterville at 
five o'clock in the morning, and one must break- 
fast in the dark at a quarter past four, because a 
train starts at twenty minutes before five, — the 
passengers by both conveyances being pastured 
gregariously. So one must be up at half past 
three. The primary geological formations contain 
no trace of man, and it seems to me that these 
eocene periods of the day are not fitted for sustain- 
ing the human forms of life. One of the Fathers 
held that the sun was created to be worshipped at 
his rising by the Gentiles. The more reason that 
Christians (except, perhaps, early Christians) should 
abstain from these heathenish ceremonials. As one 
arriving by an early train is welcomed by a drowsy 
maid with the sleep scarce brushed out of her hair, 
and finds empty grates and polished mahogany, on 
whose arid plains the pioneers of breakfast have 
not yet encamped, so a person waked thus unsea- 
sonably is sent into the world before his faculties 
are up and dressed to serve him. It might have 
been for this reason that my stomach resented for 
several hours a piece of fried beefsteak which I 
forced upon it, or, more properly speaking, a piece 
of that leathern conveniency which in these regions 
assumes the name. You will find it as Lard to 
believe, my dear Storg, as that quarrel of the 
Borbonists, whether one should say ego amat or 
no, that the use of the gridiron is unknown here- 
about, and so near a river named after St. Law- 
rence, too ! 

To-day has been the hottest day of the season. 



A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL 9 

yet our drive has not been unpleasant. For a con- 
siderable distance we followed the course of the 
Sebasticook River, a pretty stream with alterna- 
tions of dark brown pools and wine-colored rapids. 
On each side of the road the land had been cleared, 
and little one-story farm-houses were scattered at 
intervals. But the stumps still held out in most of 
the fields, and the tangled wilderness closed in be- 
hind, striped here and there with the slim white 
trunks of the elm. As yet only the edges of the 
great forest have been nibbled away. Sometimes 
a root-fence stretched up its bleaching antlers, like 
the trophies of a giant hunter. Now and then the 
houses thickened into an unsocial-looking village, 
and we drove up to the grocery to leave and take a 
mail-bag, stopping again presently to water the 
horses at some pallid little tavern, whose one red- 
curtained eye (the bar-room) had been put out by 
the inexorable thrust of Maine Law. Had Shen- 
stone travelled this road, he would never have writ- 
ten that famous stanza of his ; had Johnson, he 
would never have quoted it. They are to real inns 
as the skull of Yorick to his face. Where these 
villages occurred at a distance from the river, it 
was difficult to account for them. On the river- 
bank, a saw-mill or a tannery served as a logical 
premise, and saved them from total inconsequen- 
tiality. As we trailed along, at the rate of about 
four miles an hour, it was discovered that one of 
our mail-bags was missing. " Guess somebody '11 
pick it up," said the driver coolly; " 't any rate, 
likely there's nothin' in it." Who knows how 



10 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL 

lonar it took some Elam D. or Zebulon K. to com- 
pose the missive intrusted to that vagrant bag, and 
how much longer to persuade Pamela Grace or 
Sophronia Melissa that it had really and truly been 
written ? The discovery of our loss was made by 
a tall man who sat next to me on the top of the 
coach, every one of whose senses seemed to be 
prosecuting its several investigation as we went 
along. Presently, sniffing gently, he remarked : 
" 'Pears to me 's though I smelt sunthin'. Ain't 
the aix het, think ? " The driver pulled up, and, 
sure enough, the off fore-wheel was found to be 
smoking. In three minutes he had snatched a rail 
from the fence, made a lever, raised the coach, and 
taken off the wheel, bathing the hot axle and box 
with water from the river. It was a pretty spot, 
and I was not sorry to lie under a beech-tree 
(Tityrus-like, meditating over my pipe) and watch 
the operations of the fire-annihilator. I could not 
help contrasting the ready helpfulness of our driver, 
all of whose wits were about him, current, and 
redeemable in the specie of action on emergency, 
with an incident of travel in Italy, where, under 
a somewhat similar stress of circumstances, our 
vetturino had nothing for it but to dash his hat on 
the ground and call on Sant' Antonio, the Italian 
Hercules. 

There being four passengers for the Lake, a 
veliicle called a mud-wagon was detailed at New- 
port for our accommodation. In this we jolted and 
rattled along at a livelier pace than in the coach. 
As we got farther north, the country (especially 



A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL 11 

the hills) gave evidence of longer cultivation. 
About the thriving town of Dexter we saw fine 
farms and crops. The houses, too, became pret- 
tier ; hop-vines were trained about the doors, and 
hung their clustering thyrsi over the open win- 
dov/s. A kind of wild rose (called by the country 
folk the primrose) and asters were planted about 
the door-yards, and orchards, commonly of natural 
fruit, added to the pleasant home-look. But every- 
where we could see that the war between the white 
man and the forest was still fierce, and that it 
would be a long while yet before the axe was 
buried. The haying being over, fires blazed or 
smouldered against the stumps in the fields, and 
the blue smoke widened slowly upward through the 
quiet August atmosphere. It seemed to me that I 
could hear a sigh now and then from the imme- 
morial pines, as they stood watching these camp- 
fires of the inexorable invader. Evening set in, 
and, as we crunched and crawled up the long 
gravelly hills, I sometimes began to fancy that 
Nature had forgotten to make the corresponding 
descent on the other side. But erelong we were 
rushing down at full speed ; and, inspired by the 
dactylic beat of the horses' hoofs, I essayed to re- 
peat the opening lines of Evangeline. At the mo- 
ment I was beginning, we plunged into a hollow, 
where the soft clay had been overcome by a road of 
unhewn logs. I got through one line to this cor- 
duroy accompaniment, somewhat as a country choir 
stretches a short metre on the Procrustean rack of 
a long-drawn tune. The result was like this : — 



12 A MOOSE HE AD JOURNAL 

** Thihis ihis thebe f ohorest prihihimeheval ; thehe murhurmuring 
pihines hahand thehe hehemlohocks ! " 

At a quarter past eleven, p. M., we reached 
Greenville, (a little village which looks as if it had 
dripped down from the hills, and settled in the hol- 
low at the foot of the lake,) having accomplished 
seventy-two miles in eighteen hours. The tavern 
was totally extinguished. The driver rapped upon 
the bar-room window, and after a while we saw 
heat-lightnings of unsuccessful matches followed by 
a low grumble of vocal thunder, which I am afraid 
took the form of imprecation. Presently there was 
a great success, and the steady blur of lighted tal- 
low succeeded the fugitive brilliance of the pine. 
A hostler fumbled the door open, and stood staring 
at but not seeing us, with the sleep sticking out all 
over him. We at last contrived to launch him, 
more like an insensible missile than an intelligent 
or intelligible being, at the slumbering landlord, 
who came out wide-awake, and welcomed us as so 
many half-dollars, — twenty-five cents each for bed, 
ditto breakfast. O Shenstone, Shenstone ! The 
only roost was in the garret, which had been made 
into a single room, and contained eleven double- 
beds, ranged along the walls. It was like sleeping 
in a hospital. However, nice customs curtsy to 
eighteen-hour rides, and we slept. 

Saturday, ISth. — This morning I performed 
my toilet in the bar-room, where there was an 
abundant supply of water, and a halo of interested 
spectators. After a sufficient breakfast, we em- 
barked on the little steamer Moosehead, and were 



A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL 13 

soon throbbing up the lake. The boat, it appeared, 
had been chartered by a party, this not being one 
of her regular trips. Accordingly we were mulcted 
in twice the usual fee, the philosophy of which I 
could not understand. However, it always comes 
easier to us to comprehend why we receive than 
why we pay. I dare say it was quite clear to the 
captain. There were three or four clearings on the 
western shore ; but after passing these, the lake 
became wholly primeval, and looked to us as it did 
to the first adventurous Frenchman who paddled 
across it. Sometimes a cleared point would be pink 
with the blossoming willow-herb, " a cheap and 
excellent substitute " for heather, and, like all such, 
not quite so good as the real thing. On all sides 
rose deep-blue mountains, of remarkably graceful 
outline, and more fortunate than common in their 
names. There were the Big and Little Squaw, 
the Spencer and Lily-bay Mountains. It was de- 
bated whether we saw Katahdin or not, (perhaps 
more useful as an intellectual exercise than the 
assured vision would have been), and presently 
Mount Kineo rose abruptly before us, in shape 
not unlike the island of Capri. Mountains are 
called great natural features, and why they should 
not retain their names long enough for these also to 
become naturalized, it is hard to say. Why should 
every new surveyor rechristen them with the guber- 
natorial patronymics of the current year? They 
are geological noses, and as they are aquiline or 
pug, indicate terrestrial idiosyncrasies. A cos- 
mical physiognomist, after a glance at them, will 



14 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL 

draw no vague inference as to the character of the 
country. The word nose is no better than any- 
other word ; but since the organ has got that name, 
it is convenient to keep it. Suppose we had to 
label our facial prominences every season with the 
name of our provincial governor, how should we 
like it ? If the old names have no other meaning, 
they have that of age ; and, after all, meaning is 
a plant of slow growth, as every reader of Shake- 
speare knows. It is well enough to call mountains 
after their discoverers, for Nature has a knack of 
throwing doublets, and somehow contrives it that 
discoverers have good names. Pike's Peak is a cu- 
rious hit in this way. But these surveyors' names 
have no natural stick in them. They remind one 
of the epithets of poetasters, which peel oif like a 
badly gummed postage-stamp. The early settlers 
did better, and there is something pleasant in the 
sound of Graylock, Saddleback, and Great Hay- 
stack. 

" I love those names 
Wbere-with the exiled farmer tames 
Nature down to companionship 

With his old world's more homely mood, 
And strives the shag-g-y wild to clip 

In the arms of familiar habitude." 

It is possible that Mount Marcy and Mount 
Hitchcock may sound as well hereafter as Helles- 
pont and Peloponnesus, when the heroes, their 
namesakes, have become mythic with antiquity. 
But that is to look forward a great way. I am no 
fanatic for Indian nomenclature, — -the name of 
my native district having been Pigsgusset, — but 
let us at least agree on names for ten years. 



A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL 15 

There were a couple of loggers on board, in red 
flannel shirts, and with rifles. They were the first 
I had seen, and I was interested in their appear- 
ance. They were tall, well-knit men, straight as 
Robin Hood, and with a quiet, self-contained look 
that pleased me. I fell into talk with one of 
them. 

'* Is there a good market for the farmers here in 
the woods ? " I asked. 

" None better. They can sell what they raise at 
their doors, and for the best of prices. The lum- 
berers want it all, and more." 

" It must be a lonely life. But then we all have 
to pay more or less life for a living." 

"Well, it is lonesome. Shouldn't like it. 
After all, the best crop a man can raise is a good 
crop of society. We don't live none too long, any- 
how ; and without society a fellow could n't tell 
more 'n half the time whether he was alive or not." 

This speech gave me a glimpse into the life of 
the lumberers' camp. It was plain that there a 
man would soon find out how much alive he was, 
— there he could learn to estimate his quality, 
weighed in the nicest self-adjusting balance. The 
best arm at the axe or the paddle, the surest eye 
for a road or for the weak point of a Jam, the 
steadiest foot upon the squirming log, the most 
persuasive voice to the tugging oxen, — all these 
things are rapidly settled, and so an aristocracy is 
evolved from this democracy of the woods, for good 
old mother Nature speaks Saxon still, and with 
her either Canning: or Kenning means King. 



16 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL 

A string of five loons was flying back and forth 
in long, irregular zigzags, uttering at intervals 
their wild, tremulous cry, which always seems far 
away, like the last faint pulse of echo dying among 
the hills, and which is one of those few sounds 
that, instead of disturbing solitude, only deepen 
and confirm it. On our inland ponds they are 
usually seen in pairs, and I asked if it were com- 
mon to meet five together. My question was an- 
swered by a queer-looking old man, chiefly remark- 
able for a pair of enormous cowhide boots, over 
which large blue trousers of f rocking strove in vain 
to crowd themselves. 

" Wahl, 't ain't ushil," said he, "and it's called 
a sign o' rain comin', that is." 

" Do you think it will rain ? " 

With the caution of a veteran auspex^ he evaded 
a direct reply. " Wahl, they du say it 's a sign o' 
rain comin'," said he. 

I discovered afterward that my interlocutor was 
Uncle Zeb. Formerly, every New England town 
had its representative uncle. He was not a pawn- 
broker, but some elderly man who, for want of more 
defined family ties, had gradually assumed this 
avuncular relation to the community, inhabiting the 
border-land between respectability and the alms- 
house, with no regular calling, but ready for odd 
jobs at haying, wood-sawing, whitewashing, associ- 
ated with the demise of pigs and the ailments of 
cattle, and possessing as much patriotism as might 
be implied in a devoted attachment to " New Eng- 
land " — with a good deal of sugar and very little 



A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL 17 

water in it. Uncle Zeb was a good specimen of this 
palaeozoic class, extinct among us for the most part, 
or surviving, like the Dodo, in the Botany Bays of 
society. He was ready to contribute (somewhat 
muddily) to all general conversation ; but his chief 
topics were his boots and the 'Roostick war. Upon 
the lowlands and levels of ordinary palaver he 
would make rapid and unlooked-for incursions; 
but, provision failing, he would retreat to these 
two fastnesses, whence it was impossible to dislodge 
him, and to which he knew innmnerable passes 
and short cuts quite beyond the conjecture of com- 
mon woodcraft. His mind opened naturally to 
these two subjects, like a book to some favorite 
passage. As the ear accustoms itself to any sound 
recurring regularly, such as the ticking of a clock, 
and, without a conscious effort of attention, takes 
no impression from it whatever, so does the mind 
find a natural safeguard against this pendulum 
species of discourse, and performs its duties in the 
parliament by an unconscious reflex action, like 
the beating of the heart or the movement of the 
lungs. If talk seemed to be flagging, our Uncle 
would put the heel of one boot upon the toe of the 
other, to bring it within point-blank range, and 
say, " Wald, I stump the Devil himself to make 
that 'ere boot hurt my foot," leaving us in doubt 
whether it were the virtue of the foot or its case 
which set at naught the wiles of the adversary ; or, 
looking up suddenly, he would exclaim, " Walil, 
we eat some beans to the 'Roostick war, I tell 
you ! " When his poor old clay was wet with gin, 



18 A MOOSEHEAD JOVRXAL 

Ins tiioagiits aixd words aeqnired a rank flanv fnisi 
it, u &am too stzo^ a fratifapr. At sodi tines* 
too, Ids fasuBf eanmonlf revetted to a prdartane 
peciod of his lifie,idieB he sii^jhad settied all 
tiie smromdi]^ cuuniiy, snhdned the In jmiB and 
other wild amsals, and mned an liie towns. 

We talked of Ihe winter-camps and Ihe life 
these. «" The hest; thing k,"" said our Unde, ^ to 
hear a log sqfoeal thin the snow. Git a good, eal\ 
itostf moinin% in FdwDy sa^^, an' take an' hiteh 
the erittns on to a log that H scale seren thoiKan', 
an"* itH sipKal as pooty as an'^thin' yoa ever 
ItdlyoK.'' 

Apanse. 

^ Le9see,^seen Gal HntehiiB laldt^? " 

^ Saons to ne's fhoo«^ I hedn^t 
the "Boosti^ war. WaM,'' <fee^ <fee. 

Another passe. 

"To kMk at them hoote jon'd tidnk di^was 
too large ; bat kind o' git tout foot into 'em, and 
they're as easy 's a ^ove.'' (I ohsa-ved that he 
jMSva seemed really to get his foot in, — there was 
alwi^s a qoaHfring Mmd o'S) ^ Wahl, my foot 
can play in *em like a yom^ hedgidiog.'' 

By this time we had arnred at Kineo, — a floor- 
ehii^ viDage of one home, the txiem bqit by 
'Sqnire BarrowE. The 'Sqmre s a laige, hearty 
ifnaiy, with a Toiee as clear and ttn iMg as a north- 
west wind, and a great lao^ snitahle to it. His 
taUe is neat and wdl SB^^ilied, and he waits iqion 
It himself r: ^ t- --^^ old ]s:^d3— -LV ^afaion. One 



A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL 19 

may be much better ofF here, to my thinking, than 
in one of those gigantic Columbaria which are 
foisted upon us patient Americans for hotels, and 
where one is packed away in a pigeon-hole so near 
the heavens that, if the comet should flirt its tail, 
(no unlikely thing in the month of flies,) one would 
nm some risk of being brushed away. Here one 
does not pay his diurnal three dollars for an undi- 
vided five-hundredth part of the pleasure of look- 
ing at gilt gingerbread. Here one's relations are 
with the monarch himself, and one is not obliged to 
wait the slow leisure of those " attentive clerks " 
whose praises are sung by thankful deadlieads, and 
to whom the slave who pays may feel as much 
gratitude as might thrill the heart of a brown-paper 
parcel toward the express-man who labels it and 
chucks it under his counter. 

Sunday^ l^th. — The loons were right. About 
midnifjht it besran to rain in earnest, and did not 
hold up till about ten o'clock this morning. " Tliis 
is a Maine dew," said a shaggy woodman cheerily, 
as he shook the water out of his wide-awake, " if it 
don't look out sharp, it '11 begin to rain afore it 
thinks on't." The day was mostly spent within 
doors : but I found good and intelligent society. 
We shoidd have to be shipwTccked on Juan Fer- 
nandez not to find men who knew more than we. 
In these travelling encounters one is thrown upon 
his own resources, and is worth just what he car- 
ries about him. The social currency of home, the 
smooth-worn coin which passes freely among friends 
and neifrhbors, is of no account. We are thrown 



20 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL 

back upon the old system of barter ; and, even with 
savages, we bring away only as much of the wild 
wealth of the woods as we carry beads of thought 
and experience, strung one by one in painful years, 
to pay for them with. A useful old jacldtnife will 
buy more than the daintiest Louis Quinze paper- 
folder fresh from Paris. Perhaps the kind of in- 
telligence one gets in these out-of-the-way places 
is the best, — where one takes a fresh man after 
breakfast instead of the damp morning paper, and 
where the magnetic telegraph of human sympathy 
flashes swift news from brain to brain. 

Meanwhile, at a pinch, to-morrow's weather can 
be discussed. The augury from the flight of birds 
is favorable, — the loons no longer prophesying 
rain. The wind also is hauling round to the right 
quarter, according to some, — to the wrong, if we 
are to believe others. Each man has his private 
barometer of hope, the mercury in which is more 
or less sensitive, and the opinion vibrant with its 
rise or fall. Mine has an index which can be 
moved mechanically. I fixed it at setfair^ and re- 
signed myself. I read an old volume of the Patent- 
Office Report on Agriculture, and stored away a 
beautiful pile of facts and observations for future 
use, which the current of occupation, at its first 
freshet, would sweep quietly ofit to blank oblivion. 
Practical application is the only mordant which 
will set things in the memory. Study, without it, 
is gymnastics, and not work, which alone will get 
intellectual bread. One learns more metaphysics 
from a single temptation than from all the philoso- 



A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL 21 

phers. It is curious, though, how tyrannical the 
habit of reading is, and what shifts we make to 
escape thinking. There is no bore we dread being 
left alone with so much as our own minds. I have 
seen a sensible man study a stale newspaper in a 
country tavern, and husband it as he would an old 
shoe on a raft after shipwreck. Why not try a bit 
of hibernation? There are few brains that would 
not be better for living on their own fat a little 
while. With these reflections, I, notwithstanding, 
spent the afternoon over my Report. If our own 
experience is of so little use to us, what a dolt is 
he who recommends to man or nation the experi- 
ence of others ! Like the mantle in the old ballad, 
it is always too short or too long, and exposes or 
trips us up. " Keep out of that candle," says old 
Father Miller, " or you '11 get a singeing." " Pooh, 
pooh, father, I 've been dipped, in the new asbestos 
preparation," and frozz! it is all over with young 
Hopeful. How many warnings have been drawn 
from Pretorian bands, and Janizaries, and Mame- 
lukes, to make Napoleon III. impossible in 1851! 
I found myself thinking the same thoughts over 
again, when we walked later on the beach and 
picked up pebbles. The old time-ocean throws 
upon its shores just such rounded and pohshed re- 
sults of the eternal turmoil, but we only see the 
beauty of those we have got the headache in stoop- 
ing for ourselves, and wonder at the dull brown 
bits of common stone with which our comrades 
have stuffed their pockets. Afterwards this little 
fable came of it. 



22 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL 



DOCTOR LOBSTER. 

A PERCH, who had the toothache, once 
Thus moaned, like any human dunce : 
** Why must great souls exhaust so soon 
Life's thin and unsubstantial boon ? 
Existence on such sculpin terms, 
Their vulgar loves and hard-won worms. 
What is it all but dross to me, 
Whose nature craves a larger sea ; 
Whose inches, six from head to tail, 
Enclose the spirit of a whale ; 
Wlio, if great baits were still to win, 
By watchful eye and fearless fin 
Might with the Zodiac's awful twain 
Room for a third immortal gain ? 
Better the crowd's unthinking plan, 
The hook, the jerk, the frying-pan! 
O Death, thou ever roaming shark. 
Ingulf me in eternal dark ! ' ' 

The speech was cut in two by flight: 
A real shark had come in sight ; 
No metaphoric monster, one 
It soothes despair to call upon, 
But stealthy, sidelong, grim, i-wis, 
A bit of downright Nemesis ; 
While it recovered from the shock, 
Our fish took shelter 'neath a rock: 
This was an ancient lobster's house, 
A lobster of prodigious nous, 
So old that barnacles had spread 
Their white encampments o'er his head. 
And of experience so stupend. 
His claws were blunted at the end, 
Turning life's iron pages o'er, 
That shut and can be oped no more. 

Stretching a hospitable claw, 
"At once," said he, " the point I saw *, 



A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL 23 

My dear young friend, your ease I rue, 

Your great-great-grandfather I knew ; 

He was a tried and tender friend 

I know, — I ate him in the end : 

In this vile sea a pilgrim long. 

Still my sight 's good, my memory strongf •, 

The only sign that age is near 

Is a slight deafness in this ear ; 

I understand your case as well 

As this my old familiar shell ; 

This Welt-schmerz is a brand-new notion, 

Come in since first I knew the ocean ; 

We had no radicals, nor crimes. 

Nor lobster-pots, in good old times ; 

Your traps and nets and hooks we owe 

To Messieurs Louis Blanc and Co. ; 

I say to all my sons and daughters, 

Shun Red Republican hot waters ; 

No lobster ever cast his lot 

Among the reds, but went to pot : 

Your trouble 's in the jaw, you said ? 

Come, let me just nip off your head. 

And, when a new one comes, the pain 

Will never trouble you again : 

Nay, nay, fear naught : 't is nature's law. 

Four times I 've lost this starboard claw; 

And still, erelong, another grew. 

Good as the old, — and better too I '* 

The perch consented, and next day 
An osprey, marketing that way, 
Picked up a fish without a head. 
Floating with belly up, stone dead. 

MORAL. 

Sharp are the teeth of ancient saws, 
And sauce for goose is gander's sauce ; 
But perch's heads are n't lobster's claws. 

Monday^ 15th. — The morning was fine, and we 
were called at four o'clock. At the moment my 



24 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL 

door was knocked at, I was mounting a giraffe with 
that charming nil admirari which characterizes 
dreams, to visit Prester John. Rat-tat-tat-tat ! 
upon my door and upon the horn gate of dreams 
also. I remarked to my skowhegan (the Tatar for 
giraffe-driver) that I was quite sure the animal had 
the raps^ a common disease among them, for I heard 
a queer knocking noise inside him. It is the sound 
of his joints, O Tambourgi ! (an Oriental term 
of reverence,) and proves him to be of the race of 
El Keirat. Rat-tat-tat-too I and I lost my dinner 
at the Prester's, embarking for a voyage to the 
Northwest Carry instead. Never use the word 
canoe^ my dear Storg, if you wish to retain your 
self-respect. Birch is the term among us back- 
woodsmen. I never knew it till yesterday; but, 
like a true philosopher, I made it appear as if I 
had been intimate with it from childhood. The 
rapidity with which the human mind levels itself 
to the standard around it gives us the most perti- 
nent warning as to the company we keep. It is 
as hard for most characters to stay at their own 
average point in all companies, as for a thermom- 
eter to say ^^"^ for twenty-four hours together. I 
like this in our friend Johannes Taurus, that he 
carries everywhere and maintains his insular tem- 
perature, and will have everything accommodate 
itself to that. Shall I confess that this morning I 
would rather have broken the moral law, than have 
endangered the equipoise of the birch by my awk- 
wardness ? that I should have been prouder of a 
compliment to my paddling, than to have had both 



A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL 25 

my guides suppose me the author of Hamlet? 
Well, Cardinal Richelieu used to jump over chairs. 

We were to paddle about twenty miles ; but we 
made it rather more by crossing and recrossing the 
lake. Twice we landed, — once at a camp, where 
we foimd the cook alone, bakino^ bread and grinfrer- 
bread. Monsieur Soyer would have been startled 
a little by this shaggy professor, — this Pre-Ra- 
phaelite of cookery. He represented the salceratus 
period of the art, and his bread was of a brilliant 
yellow, like those cakes tinged with saffron, which 
hold out so lono^ asainst time and the flies in little 
water-side shops of seaport towns, — dingy extrem- 
ities of trade fit to moulder on Lethe wharf. His 
water was better, squeezed out of ice-cold granite 
in the neighboring mountains, and sent through 
subterranean ducts to sparkle up by the door of 
the camp. 

" There 's nothin' so sweet an' hulsome as your 
real spring water," said Uncle Zeb, " git it pure. 
But it 's dreffle hard to git it that ain't got sunthin' 
the matter of it. Snow-water '11 burn a man's in- 
side out, — I larned that to the 'Roostick war, — 
and the snow lays terrible long on some o' thes'ere 
hills. Me an' Eb Stiles was up old Ktahdn onct 
jest about this time o' year, an' we come acrost a 
kind o' holler like, as full o' snow as your stockin 's 
full o' your foot. / see it fust, an' took an' 
rammed a settin'-pole — wahl, it was all o' twenty 
foot into 't, an' couldn't fin' no bottom. I dunno 
as there 's snow-water enough in this to do no hurt. 
I don't somehow seem to think that real spring- 



26 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL 

water 's so plenty as it used to be." And Uncle 
Zeb, with perhaps a little over-refinement of scru- 
pulosity, applied his lips to the Ethiop ones of a 
bottle of raw gin, with a kiss that drew out its very 
soul, — a hasia that Secundus might have sung. 
He must have been a wonderful judge of water, for 
he analyzed this, and detected its latent snow sim- 
ply by his eye, and without the clumsy process of 
tasting. I could not help thinking that he had 
made the desert his dwelling-place chiefly in order 
to enjoy the ministrations of this one fair spirit 
unmolested. 

We pushed on. Little islands loomed trembling 
between sky and water, like hanging gardens. 
Gradually the filmy trees defined themselves, the 
aerial enchantment lost its potency, and we came 
up with common prose islands that had so late been 
magical and poetic. The old story of the attained 
and unattained. About noon we reached the head 
of the lake, and took possession of a deserted won- 
gen, in which to cook and eat our dinner. No Jew, 
I am sure, can have a more thorough dislike of salt 
pork than I have in a normal state, yet I had 
already eaten it raw with hard bread for lunch, and 
relished it keenly. We soon had our tea-kettle 
over the fire, and before long the cover was chatter- 
ing with the escaping steam, which had thus vainly 
begged of all men to be saddled and bridled, till 
James Watt one day happened to overhear it. 
One of our guides shot three Canada grouse, and 
these were turned slowly between the fire and a bit 
of salt pork, which dropped fatness upon them as 



A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL 27 

it fried. Although my fingers were certainly not 
made before knives and forks, yet they served as a 
convenient substitute for those more ancient inven- 
tions. We sat round, Turk-fashion, and ate thank- 
fully, while a party of aborigines of the Mosquito 
tribe, who had camjoed in the loongen before we 
arrived, dined upon us. I do not know what the 
British Protectorate of the Mosquitoes amounts to ; 
but, as I squatted there at the mercy of these blood- 
thirsty savages, I no longer wondered that the clas- 
sic Everett had been stung into a willingness for 
war on the question. 

" This 'ere 'd be about a complete place for a 
camp, ef there was on'y a spring o' sweet water 
handy. Frizzled pork goes wal, don't it? Yes, 
an' sets wal, too," said Uncle Zeb, and he again 
tilted his bottle, which rose nearer and nearer to 
an angle of forty-five at every gurgle. He then 
broached a curious dietetic theory: "The reason 
we take salt pork along is cos it packs handy : you 
git the greatest amount o' board in the smallest 
compass, — let alone that it 's more nourishin' than 
an'thin' else. It kind o' don't disgest so quick, but 
stays by ye, anourishin' ye all the while. 

" A feller can live wal on frizzled pork an' good 
spring-water, git it good. To the 'Roostick war 
we did n't ask for nothin' better, — on'y beans." 
( Ji7^, tllt^ gurgle^ gurgle.) Then, with an appar- 
ent feeling of inconsistency, "But then, come to 
git used to a particular kind o' spring-water, an' 
it makes a feller hard to suit. Most all sorts o' 
water taste kind o' msipid away from home. Now, 



28 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL 

I 've gut a spring to my place that 's as sweet — 
wahl, it 's as sweet as maple sap. A feller acts 
about water jest as lie doos about a pair o' boots. 
It 's all on it in gittin' wonted. Now, them boots," 
<S;c., &c. ( Gurgle, gurgle, gurgle, smack .^) 

All this while he was packing away the remains 
of the pork and hard bread in two large firkins. 
This accomplished, we re embarked, our uncle on 
his way to the birch essaying a kind of song in 
four or five parts, of which the words were hila- 
rious and the tune profoundly melancholy, and 
which was finished, and the rest of his voice appar- 
ently jerked out of him in one sharp falsetto note, 
by his tripping over the root of a tree. We pad- 
dled a short distance up a brook which came into 
the lake smootlily through a little meadow not 
far off. We soon reached the Northwest Carry, 
and our guide, pointing through the woods, said; 
" That 's the Cannydy road. You can travel that 
clearn to Kebeck, a hunderd an' twenty mile," — a 
privilege of which I respectfully declined to avail 
myseK. The offer, however, remains open to the 
public. The Carry is called two miles ; but this is 
the estimate of somebody who had nothing to lug. 
I had a headache and all my baggage, which, 
with a traveller's instinct, I had brought with me. 
(P. S. — I did not even take the keys out of my 
pocket, and both my bags were wet through before 
I came back.) My estimate of the distance is 
eighteen thousand six hundred and seventy-four 
miles and three quarters, — the fraction being the 
part left to be travelled after one of my com- 



A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL 29 

panions most kindly insisted on relieving me of 
my heaviest bag. I know very well that the an- 
cient Roman soldiers used to carry sixty pounds' 
weis-ht, and all that ; but I am not, and never shall 
be, an ancient Roman soldier, — no, not even m 
the miraculous Thundering Legion. Uncle Zeb 
slung the two provender firkins across his shoulder, 
and trudged along, grumbling that " he never see 
sech a contrairy pair as them." He had begun 
upon a second bottle of his "particular kind o' 
spring-water," and, at every rest, the gurgle of this 
peripatetic fountain might be heard, followed by a 
smack, a fragment of mosaic song, or a confused 
clatter with the cowhide boots, being an arbitrary 
symbol, intended to represent the festive dance. 
Christian's pack gave him not half so much trouble 
as the firkins gave Uncle Zeb. It grew harder 
and harder to sling them, and with every fresh 
gulp of the Batavian elixir, they got heavier. Or 
rather, the truth was, that his hat grew heavier, 
in which he was carrying on an extensive manu- 
facture of bricks without straw. At last affairs 
reached a crisis, and a particularly favorable pitch 
offering, with a puddle at the foot of it, even the 
boots afforded no sufficient ballast, and away went 
our uncle, the satellite firkins accompanying faith- 
fully his headlong flight. Did ever exiled monarch 
or disgraced minister find the cause of his fall in 
himself? Is there not always a strawberry at the 
bottom of our cup of life, on which we can lay all 
the blame of our deviations from the straight path ? 
Till now Uncle Zeb had contrived to give a gloss 



30 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL 

of volition to smaller stumblings and gyrations, by- 
exaggerating tbem into an appearance of playful 
burlesque. But the present case was beyond any 
such subterfuges. He held a bed of justice where 
he sat, and then arose slowly, with a stern deter- 
mination of vengeance stiifening every muscle of 
his face. But what would he select as the culprit? 
" It 's that cussed firkin," he mumbled to himseK. 
" I never knowed a firkin cair on so, — no, not in 
the 'Roostehicick war. There, go long, wiU ye? 
and don't come back tiU you 've larned how to walk 
with a genelman ! " And, seizing the unhappy 
scapegoat by the bail, he hurled it into the forest. 
It is a curious circumstance, that it was not the 
firkin containing the bottle which was thus con- 
demned to exile. 

The end of the Carry was reached at last, and, 
as we drew near it, we heard a sound of shouting 
and laughter. It came from a party of men making 
hay of the wild grass in Seboomok meadows, which 
lie around Seboomok pond, into which the Carry- 
empties itself. Their camp was near, and our two 
hunters set out for it, leaving us seated in the 
birch on the plashy border of the pond. The re- 
pose was perfect. Another heaven hallowed and 
deepened the polished lake, and through that nether 
world the fish-hawk's double floated with balanced 
wings, or, wheeling suddenly, flashed his whitened 
breast against the sun. As the clattering king- 
fisher flew unsteadily across, and seemed to push 
his heavy head along with ever-renewing effort, a 
visionary mate flitted from downward tree to tree 



A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL 31 

below. Some tall alders shaded us from the sun, 
in whose yellow afternoon light the drowsy forest 
was steeped, giving out that wholesome resinous 
perfume, almost the only warm odor which it is 
refreshing to breathe. The tame hay-cocks in the 
midst of the wildness gave one a pleasant reminis- 
cence of home, like hearing one's native tongue in 
a strange country. 

Presently our hunters came back, bringing with 
them a tall, thin, active-looking man, with black 
eyes, that glanced unconsciously on all sides, like 
one of those spots of sunlight which a child dances 
up and down the street with a bit of looking-glass. 
This was M., the captain of the hay-makers, a 
famous river-driver, and who was to have fifty men 
under him next winter. I could now understand 
that sleepless vigilance of eye. He had consented 
to take two of our party in his birch to seek for 
moose. A quick, nervous, decided man, he got 
them into the birch, and was off instantly, without 
a superfluous word. He evidently looked upon 
them as he would upon a couple of logs which he 
was to deliver at a certain place. Indeed, I doubt 
if life and the world presented themselves to Napier 
himself in a more logarithmic way. His only 
thought was to do the immediate duty well, and to 
pilot his particular raft down the crooked stream 
of life to the ocean beyond. The birch seemed to 
feel him as an inspiring soul, and slid away straight 
and swift for the outlet of the pond. As he disap- 
peared under the over-arching alders of the brook, 
our two hunters could not repress a grave and 



32 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL 

measured applause. There is never any extrava- 
gance among these woodmen ; their eye, accustomed 
to reckoning the number of feet which a tree will 
scale^ is rapid and close in its guess of the amount 
of stuff in a man. It was laudari a laudato^ how- 
ever, for they themselves were accounted good men 
in a birch. I was amused, in talking with them 
about him, to meet with an instance of that ten- 
dency of the human mind to assign some utterly 
improbable reason for gifts which seem unaccount- 
able. After due praise, one of them said, " I guess 
he 's got some Injun in him," although I knew very 
well that the speaker had a thorough contempt for 
the red-man, mentally and physically. Here was 
mythology in a small way, — the same that under 
more favorable auspices hatched Helen out of an 
egg and gave Merlin an Incubus for his father. I 
was pleased with aU I saw of M. He was in his 
narrow sphere a true ai a^ avSpwi/, and the ragged 
edges of his old hat seemed to become coronated as 
I looked at him. He impressed me as a man 
really educated, — that is, with his aptitudes drawn 
out and ready for use. He was A. M. and LL. D. 
in Woods CoUege, — Axe-master and Doctor of 
Logs. Are not our educations commonly like a 
pile of books laid over a plant in a pot? The com- 
pressed nature struggles through at every crevice, 
but can never get the cramp and stunt out of it. 
We spend all our youth in building a vessel for 
our voyage of life, and set forth with streamers 
flying; but the moment we come nigh the great 
loadstone mountain of our proper destiny, out leap 



A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL 33 

all our carefully-driven bolts and nails, and we get 
many a moutMul of good salt brine, and many a 
buffet of the rough water of experience, before we 
secure the bare right to live. 

We now entered the outlet, a long-drawn aisle of 
alder, on each side of which spired tall firs, spruces, 
and white cedars. The motion of the birch re- 
minded me of the gondola, and they represent 
among water-craft thefelidce, the cat tribe, stealthy, 
silent, treacherous, and preying by night. I closed 
my eyes, and strove to fancy myself in the dumb 
city, whose only horses are the bronze ones of St. 
Mark and that of CoUeoni. But Nature would 
allow no rival, and bent down an alder-bough to 
brush my cheek and recall me. Only the robin 
sings in the emerald chambers of these tall sylvan 
palaces, and the squirrel leaps from hanging bal- 
cony to balcony. 

The rain which the loons foreboded had raised 
the west branch of the Penobscot so much, that 
a strong current was setting back into the pond ; 
and, when at last we brushed through into the 
river, it was full to the brim, — too full for moose, 
the hunters said. Rivers with low banks have al- 
ways the compensation of giving a sense of entire 
fulness. The sun sank behind its horizon of pines, 
whose pointed summits notched the rosy west in an 
endless black sierra. At the same moment the 
golden moon swung slowly up in the east, like the 
other scale of that Homeric balance in which Zeus 
weighed the deeds of men. Sunset and moonrise 
at once ! Adam had no more in Eden — except the 



34 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL 

liead of Eve upon Ms shoulder. Tlie stream was 
so smooth, that the floating logs we met seemed to 
hang in a glowing atmosphere, the shadow-half be- 
ing as real as the solid. And gradually the mind 
was etherized to a like dreamy placidity, till fact 
and fancy, the substance and the image, floating 
on the current of reverie, became but as the upper 
and under halves of one unreal reality. 

In the west still lingered a pale-green light. I 
do not know whether it be from lifelong familiarity, 
but it always seems to me that the pinnacles of 
pine-trees make an edge to the landscape which 
tells better against the twilight, or the fainter 
dawn before the rising moon, than the rounded 
and cloud-cumulus outline of hard-wood trees. 

After paddling a couple of miles, we found the 
arbored mouth of the little Malahoodus River, 
famous for moose. AV^e had been on the lookout 
for it, and I was amused to hear one of the hunters 
say to the other, to assure himself of his familiarity 
with the spot, " You drove the West Branch last 
spring, didn't you?" as one of us might ask about 
a horse. We did not explore the Malahoodus far, 
but left the other birch to thread its cedared soli- 
tudes, while we turned back to try our fortunes in 
the larger stream. We paddled on about four 
miles farther, lingering now and then opposite the 
black mouth of a moose-path. The incidents of 
our voyage were few, but quite as exciting and 
profitable as the items of the newspapers. A stray 
log compensated very well for the ordinary run of 
accidents, and the floating carkiss of a moose which 



A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL 35 

yre met could pass muster instead of a singular dis- 
covery of human remains by workmen in digging a 
cellar. Once or twice we saw what seemed ghosts 
of trees ; but they turned out to be dead cedars, in 
winding-sheets of long gray moss, made spectral by 
the moonlight. Just as we were turning to drift 
back down-stream, we heard a loud gnawing sound 
close by us on the bank. One of our guides 
thought it a hedgehog, the other a bear. I in- 
clined to the bear, as making the adventure more 
imposing. A rifle was fired at the sound, which 
began again with the most provoking indifference, 
ere the echo, flaring madly at first from shore to 
shore, died far away in a hoarse sigh. 

Half past Eleven^ p. m. — No sign of a moose 
yet. The birch, it seems, was strained at the 
Carry, or the pitch was softened as she lay on the 
shore during dinner, and she leaks a little. If 
there be any virtue in the sitzbad, I shall discover 
it. If I cannot extract green cucumbers from the 
moon's rays, I get something quite as cool. One 
of the guides shivers so as to shake the birch. 

Quarter to Twelve. — Later from the Freshet! 
— The water in the birch is about three inches 
deep, but the dampness reaches already nearly to 
the waist. I am obliged to remove the matches 
from the ground-floor of my trousers into the upper 
story of a breast-pocket. Meanwhile, we are to sit 
immovable, — for fear of frightening the moose, — 
which induces cramps. 

Half past Twelve, — A crashing is heard on the 
left bank. This is a moose in good earnest. We 



36 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL 

are besought to hold our breaths, if possible. My 
fingers so numb, I could not, if I tried. Crash ! 
crash ! again, and then a plunge, followed by dead 
stillness. " Swimmin' crik," whispers guide, sup- 
pressing all unnecessary parts of speech, — " don't 
stir." I, for one, am not likely to. A cold fog 
which has been gathering for the last hour has fin- 
ished me. I fancy myself one of those naked pigs 
that seem rushing out of market-doors in winter, 
frozen in a ghastly attitude of gallop. If I were 
to be shot myself, I should feel no interest in it. 
As it is, I am only a spectator, having declined a 
gun. Splash ! again ; this time the moose is in 
sight, and click ! click I one rifle misses fire after 
the other. The fog has quietly spiked our bat- 
teries. The moose goes crashing up the bank, and 
presently we can hear it chawing its cud close by. 
So we lie in wait, freezing. 

At one o'clock, I propose to land at a deserted 
wongen I had noticed on the way up, where I will 
make a fire, and leave them to refrigerate as much 
longer as they please. Axe in hand, I go plung- 
ing through waist-deep weeds dripping with dew, 
haunted by an intense conviction that the gnawing 
sound we had heard was a bear, and a bear at least 
eighteen hands high. There is something pokerish 
about a deserted dwelling, even in broad daylight ; 
but here in the obscure wood, and the moon filter- 
ing unwillingly through the trees ! Well, I made 
the door at last, and found the place packed fuller 
with darkness than it ever had been with hay. 
Gradually I was able to make things out a little, 



A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL 37 

and began to hack f rozenly at a log which I groped 
out. I was relieved presently by one of the guides. 
He cut at once into one of the uprights of the build- 
ing till he got some dry splinters, and we soon had 
a fire like the burning of a whole wood- wharf in our 
part of the country. My companion went back to 
the birch, and left me to keep house. First I 
knocked a hole in the roof (which the fire began 
to lick in a relishing way) for a chimney, and then 
cleared away a damp growth of " pison-elder," to 
make a sleeping place. When the unsuccessful 
hunters returned, I had everything quite comfort- 
able, and was steaming at the rate of about ten 
horse-power a minute. Young Telemachus ^ was 
sorry to give up the moose so soon, and, with the 
teeth chattering almost out of his head, he declared 
that he would like to stick it out all night. How- 
ever, he reconciled himself to the fire, and, making 
our beds of some " splits " which we poked from 
the roof, we lay down at half past two. I, who 
have inherited a habit of looking into every closet 
before I go to bed, for fear of fire, had become in 
two days such a stoic of the woods, that I went to 
sleep tranquilly, certain that my bedroom would be 
in a blaze before morning. And so, indeed, it was ; 
and the withes that bound it together being burned 
off, one of the sides fell in without waking me. 

Tuesday^ l^th. — After a sleep of two hours and 
a half, so sound that it was as good as eight, we 
started at half past four for the hay-makers' camp 

^ This was ray nephew, Charles Russell Lowell, who fell at the 
head of his brigade in the battle of Cedar Creek . 



38 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL 

again. "We found them just getting breakfast. 
We sat down upon the deacon-seat before the fire 
blazing between the bedroom and the salle a man- 
ger, which were simply two roofs of spruce-bark, 
sloping to the ground on one side, the other three 
being left open. We found that we had, at least, 
been luckier than the other party, for M. had 
brought back his convoy without even seeing a 
moose. As there was not room at the table for all of 
us to breakfast together, these hospitable woodmen 
forced us to sit down first, although we resisted 
stoutly. Our breakfast consisted of fresh bread, 
fried salt pork, stewed whortleberries, and tea. Our 
kind hosts refused to take money for it, nor would 
M. accept anything for his trouble. This seemed 
even more open-handed when I remembered that 
they had brought all their stores over the Carry 
upon their shoulders, paying an ache extra for 
every pound. If their hospitality lacked anything 
of hard external polish, it had all the deeper grace 
which springs only from sincere manliness. I have 
rarely sat at a table d'hote which might not have 
taken a lesson from them in essential courtesy. I 
have never seen a finer race of men. They have 
all the virtues of the sailor, without that unsteady 
roll in the gait with which the ocean proclaims it- 
self quite as much in the moral as in the physical 
habit of a man. They appeared to me to have hewn 
out a short northwest passage through wintry woods 
to those spice-lands of character which we dwellers 
in cities must reach, if at all, by weary voyages in 
the monotonous track of the trades. 



A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL 39 

By the way, as we were embirching last evening 
for our moose-cliase, I asked what I was to do with 
my baggage. " Leave it here," said our guide, and 
he laid the bags upon a platform of alders, which 
he bent down to keep them beyond reach of the 
rising water. 

" Will they be safe here ? " 

" As safe as they would be locked up in your 
house at home." 

And so I found them at my return ; only the 
hay-makers had carried them to their camp for 
greater security against the chances of the weather. 

We got back to Kineo in time for dinner ; and 
in the afternoon, the weather being fine, went up 
the mountain. As we landed at the foot, our guide 
pointed to the remains of a red shirt and a pair of 
blanket trousers. " That," said he, " is the reason 
there 's such a trade in ready-made clo'es. A suit 
gits pooty well wore out by the time a camp breaks 
up in the spring, and the lumberers want to look 
about right when they come back into the settle- 
ments, so they buy somethin' ready-made, and 
heave ole bust-up into the bush." True enough, 
thought I, this is the Ready-made Age. It is 
quicker being covered than fitted. So we aU go 
to the slop-shop and come out uniformed, every 
mother's son with habits of thinking and doing cut 
on one pattern, with no special reference to his 
peculiar build. 

Kineo rises 1750 feet above the sea, and 750 
above the lake. The climb is very easy, with fine 
outlooks at every turn over lake and forest. Near 



40 A MOOSE HE AD JOURNAL 

the top is a spring of water, which even Uncle Zeb 
might have allowed to be wholesome. The little 
tin dipper was scratched all over with names, show- 
ing that vanity, at least, is not put out of breath 
by the ascent. O Ozymandias, King of kings! 
We are all scrawling on something of the kind. 
" My name is engraved on the institutions of my 
country," thinks the statesman. But, alas ! insti- 
tutions are as changeable as tin-dippers ; men are 
content to drink the same old water, if the shape 
of the cup only be new, and our friend gets two 
lines in the Biographical Dictionaries. After all, 
these inscriptions, which make us smile up here, 
are about as valuable as the Assyrian ones which 
Hincks and Rawlinson read at cross-purposes. 
Have we not Smiths and Browns enough, that we 
must ransack the ruins of Nimroud for more? 
Near the spring we met a Bloomer ! It was the 
first chronic one I had ever seen. It struck me as 
a sensible costume for the occasion, and it will be 
the only wear in the Greek Kalends, when women 
believe that sense is an equivalent for grace. 

The forest primeval is best seen from the top of 
a mountain. It then impresses one by its extent, 
like an Oriental epic. To be in it is nothing, for 
then an acre is as good as a thousand square miles. 
You cannot see five rods in any direction, and the 
ferns, mosses, and tree-trunks just around you are 
the best of it. As for solitude, night will make a 
better one with ten feet square of pitch dark ; and 
mere size is hardly an element of grandeur, except 
in works of man, — as the Colosseum. It is 



A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL 41 

through one or the other pole o£ vanity that men 
feel the sublime in mountains. It is either, How 
small great I am beside it! or, Big as you are, 
little I's soul will hold a dozen o£ you. The true 
idea of a forest is not a selva selvaggia, but some- 
thing humanized a little, as we imagine the forest 
of Arden, with trees standing at royal intervals, — 
a commonwealth, and not a communism. To some 
moods, it is congenial to look over endless leagues 
of unbroken savagery without a hint of man. 

Wednesday. — This morning fished. Telemachus 
caught a laker of thirteen pounds and a haK, and 
I an overgrown cusk, which we threw away, but 
which I found afterwards Agassiz would have been 
glad of, for all is fish that comes to his net, 
from the fossil down. The fish, when caught, are 
straightway knocked on the head. A lad who went 
with us seeming to show an over-zeal in this oper- 
ation, we remonstrated. But he gave a good, 
human reason for it, — " He no need to ha' gone 
and been a fish if he didn't like it," — an excuse 
which superior strength or cunning has always 
found sufficient. It was some comfort, in this case, 
to think that St. Jerome believed in a limitation 
of God's providence, and that it did not extend to 
inanimate things or creatures devoid of reason. 

Thus, my dear Storg, I have finished my Oriental 
adventures, and somewhat, it must be owned, in the 
diffuse Oriental manner. There is very little about 
Moosehead Lake in it, and not even the Latin 
name for moose, which I might have obtained by 
sufficient research. If I had killed one, I would 



42 A MOOSE HE AD JOURNAL 

have given you his name in that dead language. I 
did not profess to give you an account of the lake ; 
but a journal, and, moreover, my journal, with a 
little nature, a little human nature, and a great 
deal of I in it, which last ingredient I take to 
be the true spirit of this species of writing ; all the 
rest being so much water for tender throats which 
cannot take it neat. 



MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE 



MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE 

1869 

One of the most delightful hooks in my father's 
library was White's "Natural History of Selborne." 
For me it has rather gained in charm with years. 
I used to read it without knowing the secret of 
the pleasure I found in it, but as I grow older I 
begin to detect some of the simple expedients of 
this natural magic. Open the book where you will, 
it takes you out of doors. In our broiling July 
weather one can walk out with this genially garru- 
lous FeUow of Oriel and find refreshment instead 
of fatigue. You have no trouble in keeping abreast 
of him as he ambles along on his hobby-horse, now 
pointing to a pretty view, now stopping to watch 
the motions of a bird or an insect, or to bag a spe- 
cimen for the Honourable Daines Barrington or 
Mr. Pennant. In simplicity of taste and natural re- 
finement he reminds one of Walton ; in tenderness 
toward what he would have called the brute crea- 
tion, of Cowper. I do not know whether his de- 
scriptions of scenery are good or not, but they have 
made me familiar with his neighborhood. Since I 
first read him, I have walked over some of his 
favorite haunts, but I still see them through his 
eyes rather than by any recollection of actual and 



46 MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE 

personal vision. The book has also the delightful- 
ness of absolute leisure. Mr. White seems never to 
have had any harder work to do than to study the 
habits of his feathered fellow-townsfolk, or to watch 
the ripening of his peaches on the wall. No doubt 
he looked after the souls of his parishioners with 
official and even friendly interest, but, I cannot help 
suspecting, with a less personal solicitude. For he 
seems to have lived before the Fall. His volumes 
are the journal of Adam in Paradise, 

" Annihilating all that 's made 
To a green thought in a green shade." 

It is positive rest only to look into that garden of 
his. It is vastly better than to 

" See great Diocletian walk 
In the Salonian garden's noble shade," 

for thither ambassadors intrude to bring with them 
the noises of Rome, while here the world has no 
entrance. No rumor of the revolt of the American 
Colonies appears to have reached him. " The nat- 
ural term of an hog's life " has more interest for 
him than that of an empire. Burgoyne may sur- 
render and welcome ; of what consequence is that 
compared with the fact that we can explain the odd 
tumbling of rooks in the air by their turning over 
" to scratch themselves with one claw " ? AU the 
couriers in Europe spurring rowel-deep make no 
stir in Mr. White's little Chartreuse ; but the ar- 
rival of the house-martin a day earlier or later than 
last year is a piece of news worth sending express 
to all his correspondents. 

Another secret charm of this book is its inad- 



MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE 47 

vertent humor, so much the more delicious because 
unsuspected by the author. How pleasant is his 
innocent vanity in adding to the list of the British, 
and still more of the Seihornmn^ fauna ! I believe 
he would gladly have consented to be eaten by a 
tiger or a crocodile, if by that means the occasional 
presence within the parish limits of either of these 
anthropophagous brutes could have been estab- 
lished. He brags of no fine society, but is plainly 
a little elated by " having considerable acquaint- 
ance with a tame brown owl." Most of us have 
known our share of owls, but few can boast of inti- 
macy with a feathered one. The great events of 
Mr. White's life, too, have that disproportionate 
importance which is always humorous. To think 
of his hands having actually been thought worthy 
(as neither Willoughby's nor Ray's were) to hold 
a stilted plover, the Charadrius himantopus^ with 
no back toe, and therefore " liable, in specidation, 
to perpetual vacillations " ! I wonder, by the way, 
if metaphysicians have no hind toes. In 1770 he 
makes the acquaintance in Sussex of ** an old fam- 
ily tortoise," which had then been domesticated 
for thirty years. It is clear that he fell in love 
with it at first sight. We have no means of tra- 
cing the growth of his passion ; but in 1780 we find 
him eloping with its object in a post-chaise. " The 
rattle and hurry of the journey so perfectly roused 
it that, when I turned it out in a border, it walked 
twice down to the bottom of my garden." It reads 
like a Court Journal : " Yesterday morning H. R. H. 
the Princess Alice took an airing of half an hour 



48 MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE 

on the terrace of Windsor Castle." This tortoise 
might have been a member of the Royal Society, 
if he could have condescended to so ignoble an am- 
bition. It had but just been discovered that a sur- 
face inclined at a certain angle with the plane of 
the horizon took more of the sun's rays. The tor- 
toise had always known this (though he unostenta- 
tiously made no parade of it), and used accordingly 
to tilt himself up against the garden-wall in the au- 
tumn. He seems to have been more of a philoso- 
pher than even Mr. White himself, caring for noth- 
ing but to get under a cabbage-leaf when it rained, 
or when the sun was too hot, and to bury himself 
alive before frost, — a four-footed Diogenes, who 
carried his tub on his back. 

There are moods in which this kind of history is 
infinitely refreshing. These creatures whom we 
affect to look down upon as the drudges of instinct 
are members of a commonwealth whose constitution 
rests on immovable bases. Never any need of re- 
construction there ! JTiey never dream of settling 
it by vote that eight hours are equal to ten, or that 
one creature is as clever as another and no more. 
They do not use their poor wits in regulating God's 
clocks, nor think they cannot go astray so long as 
they carry their guide-board about with them, — a 
delusion we often practise upon ourselves with our 
high and mighty reason, that admirable finger-post 
which points every way, as we choose to turn it, 
and always right. It is good for us now and then 
to converse with a world like Mr. White's, where 
Man is the least important of animals. But one 



MV GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE 49 

who, like me, has always lived in the country and 
always on the same spot, is drawn to his book by 
other occult sympathies. Do we not share his in- 
dignation at that stupid Martin who had graduated 
his thermometer no lower than 4° above zero of 
Fahrenheit, so that in the coldest weather ever 
known the mercury basely absconded into the bulb, 
and left us to see the victory slip through our fin- 
gers just as they were closing upon it ? No man, I 
suspect, ever lived long in the country without be- 
ing bitten by these meteorological ambitions. He 
likes to be hotter and colder, to have been more 
deeply snowed up, to have more trees, and larger, 
blown down than his neighbors. With us descend- 
ants of the Puritans especially, these weather-com- 
petitions supply the abnegated excitement of the 
race-course. Men learn to value thermometers of 
the true imaginative temperament, capable of pro- 
digious elations and corresponding dejections. The 
other day (5th July) I marked 98° in the shade, 
my high-water mark, higher by one degree than I 
had ever seen it before. I happened to meet a 
neighbor ; as we mopped our brows at each other, 
he told me that he had just cleared 100°, and I 
went home a beaten man. I had not felt the heat 
before, save as a beautiful exaggeration of sun- 
shine ; but now it oppressed me with the prosaic 
vulgarity of an oven. What had been poetic in- 
tensity became all at once rhetorical hyperbole. I 
might suspect his thermometer (as indeed I did, 
for we Harvard men are apt to think ill of any 
graduation save our own) ; but it was a poor con- 



50 MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE 

solation. The fact remained that his herald Mer- 
cury, standing a-tiptoe, could look down on mine. 
I seem to glimpse something of this familiar weak- 
ness in Mr. White. He, too, has shared in these 
mercurial triumphs and defeats. Nor do I doubt 
that he had a true country-gentleman's interest in 
the weathercock ; that his first question on coming 
down of a morning was, like Barabas's, 

" Into what quarter peers my halcyon's bill ? " 

It is an innocent and healthful employment of 
the mind, distracting one from too continual study 
of oneself, and leading one to dwell rather upon 
the indigestions of the elements than one's own. 
" Did the wind back round, or go about with the 
sun ? " is a rational question that bears not re- 
motely on the making of hay and the prosperity of 
crops. I have little doubt that the regulated ob- 
servation of the vane in many different places, and 
the interchange of results by telegraph, would put 
the weather, as it were, in our power, by betraying 
its ambushes before it is ready to give the assault.^ 
At first sight, nothing seems more droUy trivial than 
the lives of those whose single achievement is to 
record the wind and the temperature three times 
a day. Yet such men are doubtless sent into the 
world for this sjDCcial end, and perhaps there is no 
kind of accurate observation, whatever its object, 
that has not its final use and value for some one or 
other. It is even to be hoped that the speculations 
of our newspaper editors and their myriad correspon- 
^ This was written before we had a Weather Bureau. 



MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE 51 

dents upon the signs of the political atmosphere 
may also fill their appointed place in a well-reg- 
ulated universe, if it be only that of supplying so 
many more jack-o'-lanterns to the future historian. 
Nay, the observations on finance of an M. C. whose 
sole knowledge of the subject has been derived 
from a lifelong success in getting a living out of 
the public without paying any equivalent therefor, 
will perhaps be of interest hereafter to some ex- 
plorer of our cloaca maxima^ whenever it is cleansed. 

For many years I have been in the habit of noting 
down some of the leading events of my embowered 
solitude, such as the coming of certain birds and 
the like, — a kind of memoires pour sermr^ after 
the fashion of White, rather than properly digested 
natural history. I think it not impossible that a 
few simple stories of my winged acquaintances 
might be found entertaining by persons of kindred 
taste. 

There is a common notion that animals are bet- 
ter meteorologists than men, and I have little 
doubt that in immediate weather-wisdom they have 
the advantage of our sophisticated senses (though I 
suspect a sailor or shepherd would be their match), 
but I have seen nothing that leads me to believe 
their minds capable of erecting the horoscope of 
a whole season, and letting us know beforehand 
whether the winter will be severe or the summer 
rainless. Their foresight is provincial or even pa- 
rochial, 

" By nature knew he ech ascensioun 
Of equinoxial in thilke toun." 



52 MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE 

I more than suspect that the Clerk of the Weather 
himself does not always know very long in ad- 
vance whether he is to draw an order for hot or 
cold, dry or moist, and the musquash is scarce 
likely to be wiser. I have noted but two days' dif- 
ference in the coming of the song-sparrow between 
a very early and a very backward spring. This 
very year I saw the linnets at work thatching, just 
before a snow-storm which covered the ground sev- 
eral inches deep for a number of days. They struck 
work and left us for a while, no doubt in search 
of food. Birds frequently perish from sudden 
changes in our whimsical spring weather of which 
they had no foreboding. More than thirty years ago, 
a cherry-tree, then in full bloom, near my window, 
was covered with humming-birds benumbed by a 
fall of mingled rain and snow, which probably 
kiUed many of them. It should seem that their 
coming was dated by the height of the sun, which 
betrays them into im thrifty matrimony ; 

" So nature pricketh hem in their corages " ; 

but their going is another matter. The chimney- 
swallows leave us early, for example, apparently 
so soon as their latest fledglings are firm enough 
of wing to attempt the long rowing-match that is 
before them. On the other hand, the wild-geese 
probably do not leave the North tiU they are frozen 
out, for I have heard their bugles sounding south- 
ward so late as the middle of December. What may 
be called local migrations are doubtless dictated 
by the chances of food. I have once been visited 
by large flights of cross-bills; and whenever the 



Jl/r GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE 53 

snow lies long and deep on the ground, a flock of 
cedar-birds comes in midwinter to eat thebernes 
on my hawthorns. I have never been qmte able 
to fathom the local, or rather geographical partial- 
ities of birds. Never before this summer (1870) 
have the king-birds, handsomest of flycatchers, 
built in my orchard ; though I always know where 
to find them within half a mile. The rose-breasted 
grosbeak has been a familiar bird m Brookhne 
(three miles away), yet I never saw one here tiU 
last July, when I found a female busy among my 
raspberries and surprisingly bold. I hope she was 
prospecting with a view to settlement in our gar- 
den She seemed, on the whole, to think weU 
of my fruit, and I would gladly plant another bed 
if it would help to win over so delightful a neigh- 

°The return of the robin is commonly announced 
by the newspapers, like that of eminent or notori- 
ous people to a watering-place, as the first authentic 
notification of spring. And such his appearance 
in the orchard and garden undoubtedly .s But, 
in spite of his name of migratory thrush, he stays 
with us aU winter, and 1 have seen him when the 
thermometer marked 15 degrees below zero of Fah- 
renheit, armed impregnably within, like Emerson s 
Titmouse, and as cheerful as he. The robm has 
a bad reputation among people who do not value 
themselves less for being fond of cherries. There 
is, I admit, a spice of vulgarity m him, and his 
song is rather of the Bloomfield sort, ^o largely 
ballasted with prose. His ethics are of the Poor 



54 MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE 

Ricliard school, and the main chance which calls 
forth all his energy is altogether of the belly. He 
never has those fine intervals of lunacy into which 
his cousins, the catbird and the mavis, are apt to 
fall. But for a' that and twice as muckle 's a' 
that, I would not exchange him for all the cher- 
ries that ever came out of Asia Minor. With what- 
ever faults, he has not wholly forfeited that supe- 
riority which belongs to the children of nature. 
He has a finer taste in fruit than could be distilled 
from many successive committees of the Horticul- 
tural Society, and he eats with a relishing gulp not 
inferior to Dr. Johnson's. He feels and freely ex- 
ercises his right of eminent domain. His is the 
earliest mess of green peas ; his all the midberries 
I had fancied mine. But if he get also the lion's 
share of the raspberries, he is a great planter, and 
sows those wild ones in the woods, that solace 
the pedestrian and give a momentary calm even to 
the jaded victims of the White Hills. He keeps a 
strict eye over one's fruit, and knows to a shade of 
purple when your grapes have cooked long enough 
in the sun. During the severe drought a few years 
ago, the robins wholly vanished from my garden. 
I neither saw nor heard one for three weeks. 
Meanwhile a small foreign grape-vine, rather 
shy of bearing, seemed to find the dusty air con- 
genial, and, dreaming perhaps of its sweet Argos 
across the sea, decked itself with a score or so of 
fair bunches. I watched them from day to day 
till they should have secreted sugar enough from 
the sunbeams, and at last made up my mind that 



MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE 55 

I would celebrate my vintage the next morning. 
But the robins too had somehow kept note of them. 
They must have sent out spies, as did the Jews into 
the promised land, before I was stirring. When I 
went with my basket, at least a dozen of these 
winged vintagers bustled out from among the leaves, 
and alighting on the nearest trees interchanged 
some shrill remarks about me of a derogatory na- 
ture. They had fairly sacked the vine. Not Wel- 
lington's veterans made cleaner work of a Spanish 
town ; not Federals or Confederates were ever more 
impartial in the confiscation of neutral chickens. 1 
was keeping my grapes a secret to surprise the fair 
Fidele with, but the robins made them a profounder 
secret to her than I had meant. The tattered rem- 
nant of a single bunch was all my harvest-home. 
How paltry it looked at the bottom of my basket, — 
as if a humming-bird had laid her egg in an eagle's 
nest ! I could not help laughing ; and the robins 
seemed to join heartily in the merriment. There 
was a native grape-vine close by, blue with its less 
refined abundance, but my cunning thieves pre- 
ferred the foreign flavor. Could I tax them with 
want of taste ? 

The robins are not good solo singers, but their 
chorus, as, like primitive fire-worshippers, they hail 
the return of light and warmth to the world, is un- 
rivalled. There are a hundred singing like one. 
They are noisy enough then, and sing, as poets 
should, with no afterthought. But when they come 
after cherries to the tree near my window, they 
mufae their voices, and their faint j)ip, pip, pop I 



56 MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE 

sounds far away at the bottom of the garden, where 
they know I shall not suspect them of robbing the 
great black-walnut of its bitter-rinded store.^ They 
are feathered Pecksniffs, to be sure, but then how 
brightly their breasts, that look rather shabby in 
the sunlight, shine in a rainy day against the dark 
green of the fringe-tree ! After they have pinched 
and shaken all the life out of an earthworm, as 
Italian cooks pound all the spirit out of a steak, 
and then gulped him, they stand up in honest self- 
confidence, expand their red waistcoats with the 
virtuous air of a lobby member, and outface you 
with an eye that calmly challenges inquiry. " Do 
/ look like a bird that knows the flavor of raw ver- 
min? I throw myself upon a jury of my peers. 
Ask any robin if he ever ate anything less ascetic 
than the frugal berry of the junijDer, and he will 
answer that his vow forbids him." Can such an 
open bosom cover such depravity ? Alas, yes ! I 
have no doubt his breast was redder at tliat very 
moment with the blood of my raspberries. On 
the whole, he is a doubtful friend in the garden. 
He makes his dessert of all kinds of berries, and 
is not averse from early pears. But when we re- 
member how omnivorous he is, eating his own 
weight in an incredibly short time, and that Nature 
seems exhaustless in her invention of new insects 
hostile to vegetation, perhaps we may reckon that 
he does more good than harm. For my own part, 

' The screech-owl, whose cry, despite his ill name, is one of the 
sweetest sounds in nature, softens his voice in the same way with 
the most beguiling mockery of distance. 



MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE 57 

I would rather have his cheerfulness and kind 
neighborhood than many berries. 

For his cousin, the catbird, I have a still warmer 
regard. Always a good singer, he sometimes nearly 
equals the brown thrush, and has the merit of 
keeping up his music later in the evening than any 
bird of my familiar acquaintance. Ever since I 
can remember, a pair of them have built in a gi- 
gantic syringa, near our front door, and I have 
known the male to sing almost uninterruptedly 
during the evenings of early summer till twilight 
duskened into dark. They differ greatly in vocal 
talent, but all have a delightful way of crooning 
over, and, as it were, rehearsing their song in an 
undertone, which makes their nearness always un- 
obtrusive. Though there is the most trustworthy 
witness to the imitative propensity of this bird, I 
have only once, during an intimacy of more than 
forty years, heard him indulge it. In that case, 
the imitation was by no means so close as to de- 
ceive, but a free reproduction of the notes of some 
other birds, especially of the oriole, as a kind of 
variation in his own song. The catbird is as shy 
as the robin is vulgarly familiar. Only when his 
nest or his fledglings are approached does he be- 
come noisy and almost aggressive. I have known 
him to station his young in a thick cornel-bush on 
the edge of the raspberry-bed, after the fruit began 
to ripen, and feed them there for a week or more. 
In such cases he shows none of that conscious 
guilt which makes the robin contemptible. On 
the contrary, he will maintain his post in the 



58 MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE 

thicket, and sharply scold the intruder who ven- 
tures to steal his berries. After all, his claim is 
only for tithes, while the robin will bag your en- 
tire crop if he get a chance. 

Dr. Watts's statement that " birds in their little 
nests agree," like too many others intended to form 
the infant mind, is very far from being true. On 
the contrary, the most peaceful relation of the dif- 
ferent species to each other is that of armed neu- 
trality. They are very jealous of neighbors. A 
few years ago, I was much interested in the house- 
building of a pair of summer yellow-birds. They 
had chosen a very pretty site near the top of a tall 
white lilac, within easy eye-shot of a chamber win- 
dow. A very pleasant thing it was to see their 
little home growing with mutual help, to watch 
their industrious skill interrupted only by little 
flirts and snatches of endearment, frugally cut short 
by the common-sense of the tiny housewife. They 
had brought their work nearly to an end, and had 
already begun to line it with fern-down, the gath- 
ering of which demanded more distant journeys 
and longer absences. But, alas ! the syringa, im- 
memorial manor of the catbirds, was not more than 
twenty feet away, and these " giddy neighbors " had, 
as it appeared, been all along jealously watchful, 
though silent, witnesses of what they deemed an 
intrusion of squatters. No sooner were the pretty 
mates fairly gone for a new load of lining, than 

*' To their unguarded nest these weasel Scots 
Came stealing." 

Silently they flew back and forth, each giving a 



MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE 59 

vengeful dab at the nest in passing. They did 
not fall-to and deliberately destroy it, for they 
might have been caught at their mischief. As it 
was, whenever the yeUow-birds came back, their 
enemies were hidden in their own sight-proof bush. 
Several times their unconscious victims repaired 
damages, but at length, after counsel taken to- 
gether, they gave it up. Perhaps, like other un- 
lettered folk, they came to the conclusion that the 
Devil was in it, and yielded to the invisible perse- 
cutions of witchcraft. 

The robins, by constant attacks and annoyances, 
have succeeded in driving off the blue-jays who 
used to build in our pines, their gay colors and 
quaint noisy ways making them welcome and 
amusing neighbors. I once had the chance of 
doing a kindness to a household of them, which 
they received with very friendly condescension. I 
had had my eye for some time upon a nest, and 
was puzzled by a constant fluttering of what 
seemed full-grown wings in it whenever I drew 
nigh. At last I climbed the tree, in spite of 
angry protests from the old birds against my in- 
trusion. The mystery had a very simple solution. 
In building the nest, a long piece of packthread 
had been somewhat loosely woven in. Three of 
the young had contrived to entangle themselves in 
it, and had become full-grown without being able 
to launch themselves upon the air. One was un- 
harmed ; another had so tightly twisted the cord 
about its shank that one foot was curled up and 
seemed paralyzed; the third, in its struggles to 



60 MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE 

escape, had sawn through the flesh of the thigh 
and so much harmed itself that I thought it hu- 
mane to put an end to its misery. When I took 
out my knife to cut their hempen bonds, the heads 
of the family seemed to divine my friendly intent. 
Suddenly ceasing their cries and threats, they 
perched quietly within reach of my hand, and 
watched me in my work of manumission. This, 
owing to the fluttering terror of the prisoners, was 
an affair of some delicacy ; but erelong I was re- 
warded by seeing one of them fly away to a neigh- 
boring tree, while the cripple, making a parachute 
of his wings, came lightly to the ground, and 
hopped off as well as he could with one leg, obse- 
quiously waited on by his elders. A week later I 
had the satisfaction of meeting him in the pine- 
walk, in good spirits, and already so far recovered 
as to be able to balance himself with the lame foot. 
I have no doubt that in his old age he accounted 
for his lameness by some handsome story of a 
wound received at the famous Battle of the Pines, 
when our tribe, overcome by numbers, was driven 
from its ancient camping-ground. Of late years 
the jays have visited us only at intervals ; and in 
winter their bright plumage, set off by the snow, 
and their cheerful cry, are especially welcome. 
They would have furnished ^Esop with a fable, for 
the feathered crest in which they seem to take so 
much satisfaction is often their fatal snare. Coun- 
try boys make a hole with their finger in the snow- 
crust just large enough to admit the jay's head, 
and, hollowing it out somewhat beneath, bait it 



MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE 61 

with a few kernels of corn. The crest slips easily 
into the trap, but refuses to be pulled out again, 
and he who came to feast remains a prey. 

Twice have the crow-blackbirds attempted a set- 
tlement in my pines, and twice have the robins, 
who claim a right of preemption, so successfully 
played the part of border-ruffians as to drive them 
away, — to my great regret, for they are the 
best substitute we have for rooks. At Shady Hill 
(now, alas ! empty of its so long-loved household) 
they build by hundreds, and nothing can be more 
cheery than their creaking clatter (Hke a conven- 
tion of old-fashioned tavern-signs) as they gather 
at evening to debate in mass meeting their windy 
politics, or to gossip at tbeir tent-doors over the 
events of the day. Their port is grave, and their 
stalk across the turf as martial as that of a second- 
rate ghost in Hamlet. They never meddled with 
my corn, so far as I could discover. 

For a few years I had crows, but their nests are 
an irresistible bait for boys, and their settlement 
was broken up. They grew so wonted as to throw 
off a great part of their shyness, and to tolerate 
my near approach. One very hot day I stood for 
some time within twenty feet of a mother and three 
children, who sat on an elm bough over my head, 
gasping in the sultry air, and holding their wings 
half-spread for coolness. All birds during the 
pairing season become more or less sentimental, 
and murmur soft nothings in a tone very unlike 
the grinding-organ repetition and loudness of their 
habitual song. The crow is very comical as a 



62 MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE 

lover, and to hear him trying to soften his croak to 
the proper Saint Preux standard, has something 
the effect of a Mississippi boatman quoting Tenny- 
son. Yet there are few things to my ear more 
melodious than his caw of a clear winter morning 
as it drops to you filtered through five hundred 
fathoms of crisp blue air. The hostility of all 
smaller birds makes the moral character of the 
crow, for all his deaconlike demeanor and garb, 
somewhat questionable. He could never sally 
forth without insult. The golden robins, especially, 
would chase him as far as I could follow with my 
eye, making him duck clumsily to avoid their im- 
portunate bills. I do not believe, however, that he 
robbed any nests hereabouts, for the refuse of the 
gas-works, which, in our free-and-easy community, 
is allowed to poison the river, supplied him with 
dead alewives in abundance. I used to watch him 
making his periodical visits to the salt-marshes and 
coming back with a fish in his beak to his young 
savages, who, no doubt, like it in that condition 
which makes it savory to the Kanakas and other 
corvine races of men. 

Orioles are in great plenty with me. I have 
seen seven males flashing about the garden at once. 
A merry crew of them swing their hammocks from 
the pendulous boughs. During one of these latter 
years, when the canker-worms stripped our elms as 
bare as winter, these birds went to the trouble of 
rebuilding their unroofed nests, and chose for the 
purpose trees which are safe from those swarming 
vandals, such as the ash and the button-wood. 



AIY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE 63 

One year a pair (disturbed, I suppose, elsewhere) 
luiilt a second nest in an elm, within a few yards 
of the house. My friend, Edward E. Hale, told 
me once that the oriole rejected from his web all 
strands of brilliant color, and I thought it a strik- 
ing example of that instinct of concealment notice- 
able in many birds, though it should seem in this 
instance that the nest was amply protected by its 
position from all marauders but owls and squirrels. 
Last year, however, I had the fullest proof that 
Mr. Hale was mistaken. A pair of orioles built 
on the lowest trailer of a weeping elm, which hung 
within ten feet of our drawing-room window, and 
so low that I could reach it from the ground. 
The nest was wholly woven and felted with ravel- 
lings of woollen carpet in which scarlet predomi- 
nated. Would the same thing have happened in 
the woods? Or did the nearness of a human 
dwelling perhaps give the birds a greater feehng 
of security? They are very bold, by the way, in 
quest of cordage, and I have often watched them 
stripping the fibrous bark from a honeysuckle 
growing over the very door. But, indeed, all my 
birds look upon me as if I were a mere tenant at 
will, and they were landlords. With shame I 
confess it, I have been bullied even by a humming- 
bird. This spring, as I was cleansing a pear-tree 
of its lichens, one of these little zigzagging blurs 
came purring toward me, couching his long bill 
like a lance, his throat sparkling with angry fire, 
to warn me off from a Missouri-currant whose 
honey he was sipping. And many a time he has 



64 MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE 

driven me out of a flower-bed. This summer, by 
the way, a pair of these winged emeralds fastened 
their mossy acorn-cup upon a bough of the same 
elm which the orioles had enlivened the year be- 
fore. We watched all their proceedings from the 
window through an opera-glass, and saw their two 
nestlings grow from black needles with a tuft of 
down at the lower end, till they whirled away on 
their first short experimental flights. They be- 
came strong of wing in a surprisingly short time, 
and I never saw them or the male bird after, 
though the female was regular as usual in her 
visits to our petunias and verbenas. I do not 
think it ground enough for a generalization, but 
in the many times when I watched the old birds 
feeding their young, the mother always alighted, 
while the father as uniformly remained upon the 
wing. 

The bobolinks are generally chance visitors, tin- 
kling through the garden in blossoming-time, but 
this year, owing to the long rains early in the sea- 
son, their favorite meadows were flooded, and they 
were driven to the upland. So I had a pair of 
them domiciled in my grass-field. The male used 
to perch in an apple-tree, then in full bloom, and, 
while I stood perfectly still close by, he would cir- 
cle away, quivering round the entire field of five 
acres, with no break in his song, and settle down 
again among the blossoms, to be hurried away al- 
most immediately by a new rapture of music. He 
had the volubility of an Italian charlatan at a fair, 
and, like him, appeared to be proclaiming the mer- 



MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE 65 

its of some quack remedy. Opodeldoc-opodeldoc- 
try- Doctor- Lincoln s-opodeldoc ! he seemed to re- 
peat over and over again, with a rapidity that 
v/ould have distanced the deftest-tongued Figaro 
that ever rattled. I remember Count Gurowski 
saying once, with that easy superiority of know- 
ledge about this country which is the monopoly of 
foreigners, that we had no singing-birds ! Well, 
well, Mr. Hepworth Dixon has found the typical 
America in Oneida and Salt Lake City. Of 
course, an intelligent European is the best judge 
of these matters. The truth is there are more 
singing-birds in Europe because there are fewer 
forests. These songsters love the neighborhood of 
man because hawks and owls are rarer, while their 
own food is more abundant. Most people seem to 
think, the more trees, the more birds. Even Cha- 
teaubriand, who first tried the primitive-forest- 
cure, and whose description of the wilderness in its 
imaginative effects is unmatched, fancies the " peo- 
ple of the air singing their hymns to him." So 
far as my own observation goes, the farther one 
penetrates the sombre solitudes of the woods, the 
more seldom does one hear the voice of any sing- 
ing-bird. In spite of Chateaubriand's minuteness 
of detail, in spite of that marvellous reverberation 
of the decrepit tree falling of its own weight, which 
lie was the first to notice, I cannot help doubting 
whether he made his way very deep into the wil- 
derness. At any rate, in a letter to Fontanes, 
written in 1804, he speaks of mes chevaux pais- 
sants a quelque distance. To be sure Chateaubri- 



66 MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE 

and was apt to mount the high horse, and this 
may have been but an afterthought of the grand 
seigneur^ but certainly one would not make much 
headway on horseback toward the druid fastnesses 
of the primeval pine. 

The bobolinks build in considerable numbers in 
a meadow within a quarter of a mile of us. A 
houseless lane passes through the midst of their 
camp, and in clear westerly weather, at the right 
season, one may hear a score of them singing at 
once. When they are breeding, if I chance to 
pass, one of the male birds always accompanies me 
like a constable, flitting from post to post of the 
rail-fence, with a short note of reproof continually 
repeated, till I am fairly out of the neighborhood. 
Then he will swing away into the air and run down 
the wind, gurgling music without stint over the 
unheeding tussocks of meadow-grass and dark 
clumps of bulrushes that mark his domain. 

We have no bird whose song will match the 
nightingale's in compass, none whose note is so 
rich as that of the European blackbird ; but for 
mere rapture I have never heard the bobolink's 
rival. Yet his opera-season is a short one. The 
ground and tree sparrows are our most constant 
performers. It is now late in August, and one of 
the latter sings every day and all day long in the 
garden. Till within a fortnight, a pair of indigo- 
birds would keep up their lively duo for an hour 
together. While I write, I hear an oriole gay as 
in June, and the plaintive may-he of the goldfinch 
tells me he is stealing my lettuce-seeds. 1 know 



MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE 67 

not what the experience of others may have been, 
but the only bird I have ever heard sing in the 
night has been the chip-bird. I should say he sang 
about as often during the darkness as cocks crow. 
One can hardly help fancying that he sings in his 
dreams. 

"Father of light, what sunnie seed, 
What g-lance of day hast thou confined 
Into this bird ? To all the breed 
This busie ray thou hast assigned ; 
Their magnetism works all night 
And dreams of Paradise and light." 

On second thought, I remember to have heard the 
cuckoo strike the hours nearly all night with the 
regularity of a Swiss clock. 

The dead limbs of our elms, which I spare to 
that end, bring us the flicker every summer, and 
almost daily I hear his wild scream and laugh close 
at hand, himseK invisible. He is a shy bird, but 
a few days ago I had the satisfaction of studying 
him through the blinds as he sat on a tree within 
a few feet of me. Seen so near and at rest, he 
makes good his claim to the title of pigeon-wood- 
pecker. Lumberers have a notion that he is harm- 
ful to timber, digging little holes through the bark 
to encourage the settlement of insects. The regu- 
lar rings of such perforations which one may see 
in almost any apple-orchard seem to give some 
probability to this theory. Almost every season a 
solitary quail visits us, and, unseen among the cur- 
rant-bushes, calls Boh White, Bob WTiite, as if 
he were playing at hide-and-seek with that imagi- 
nary being. A rarer visitant is the turtle-dove, 



68 MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE 

whose pleasant coo (something like the muffled 
crow of a cock from a coop covered with snow) I 
have sometimes heard, and whom I once had the 
good luck to see close by me in the mulberry-tree. 
The wild-pigeon, once numerous, I have not seen 
for many years. ^ Of savage birds, a hen-hawk 
now and then quarters himself upon us for a few 
days, sitting sluggish in a tree after a surfeit of 
poultry. One of them once offered me a near shot 
from my study-window one drizzly day for several 
hours. But it was Sunday, and I gave him the 
benefit of its gracious truce of God. 

Certain birds have disappeared from our neigh- 
borhood within my memory. I remember when 
the whippoorwill could be heard in Sweet Auburn. 
The night-hawk, once common, is now rare. The 
brown thrush has moved farther up country. For 
years I have not seen or heard any of the larger 
owls, whose hooting was one of my boyish terrors. 
The cliff-swallow, strange emigrant, that eastward 
takes his way, has come and gone again in my 
time. The bank-swallows, wellnigh innumerable 
during my boyhood, no longer frequent the crum- 
bly cliff of the gravel-pit by the river. The barn- 
swallows, which once swarmed in our barn, flash- 
ing through the dusty sunstreaks of the mow, have 
been gone these many years. My father would lead 
me out to see them gather on the roof, and take 
counsel before their yearly migration, as Mr. White 
used to see them at Selborne. SJheu, fugaces I 
Thank fortune, the swift still glues his nest, and 
1 They made their appearance again this summer (1870). . 



MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE 69 

rolls his distant thunders night and day in the 
wide-throated chimneys, still sprinkles the evening 
air with his merry twittering. The populous her- 
onry in Fresh Pond meadows has been wellnigh 
broken up, but still a pair or two haunt the old 
home, as the gypsies of EUangowan their ruined 
huts, and every evening fly over us riverwards, 
clearing their throats with a hoarse hawk as they 
go, and, in cloudy weather, scarce higher than the 
tops of the chimneys. Sometimes I have known 
one to alight in one of our trees, though for what 
purpose I never could divine. Since this was writ- 
ten, they began in greater numbers to spend the 
day in a group of pines just within my borders. 
Once, when my exploring footstep startled them, 
I counted fifty flashing in circles over my head. 
By watchful protection I induced two pairs of them 
to build, and, as if sensible of my friendship, they 
made their nests in a pine within a hundred feet 
of the house. They shine for ever in Longfellow's 
verse. Kingfishers have sometimes puzzled me in 
the same way, perched at high noon in a pine, 
springing their watchman's rattle when they flitted 
away from my curiosity, and seeming to shove 
their top-heavy heads along as a man does a wheel- 
barrow. 

Some birds have left us, I suppose, because the 
country is growing less wild. I once found a sum- 
mer duck's nest within quarter of a mile of our 
house, but such a trouvaille would be impossible 
now as Kidd's treasure. And yet the mere taming 
of the neighborhood does not quite satisfy me as an 



70 MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE 

explanation. Twenty years ago, on my way to 
bathe in the river, I saw every day a brace of wood- 
cock, on the miry edge of a spring within a few 
rods of a house, and constantly visited by thirsty 
cows. There was no growth of any kind to con- 
ceal them, and yet these ordinarily shy birds were 
almost as indifferent to my passing as common 
poultry would have been. Since bird-nesting has be- 
come scientific, and dignified itself as oology, that, 
no doubt, is partly to blame for some of our losses. 
But some old friends are constant. Wilson's thrush 
comes every year to remind me of that most poetic 
of ornithologists. He flits before me through the 
pine-walk like the very genius of solitude. A pair 
of pewees have built immemorially on a jutting 
brick in the arched entrance to the ice-house. Al- 
ways on the same brick, and never more than a sin- 
gle pair, though two broods of five each are raised 
there every summer. How do they settle their 
claim to the homestead ? By what right of primo- 
geniture ? Once the children of a man employed 
about the place oologized the nest, and the pewees 
left us for a year or two. I felt towards those boys 
as the messmates of the Ancient Mariner did to- 
wards him after he had shot the albatross. But the 
pewees came back at last, and one of them is now 
on his wonted perch, so near my window that I can 
hear the click of his bill as he snaps a fly on the 
wing with the unerring precision a stately Traste- 
verina shows in the capture of her smaller deer. 
The pewee is the first bird to pipe up in the morn- 
ing ; and, during the early summer he preludes his 



MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE 71 

matutinal ejaculation of pewee witli a slender whis- 
tle, unheard at any other time. He saddens with 
the season, and, as summer declines, he changes his 
note to eheu, pewee ! as if in lamentation. Had he 
been an Italian bird, Ovid would have had a plain- 
tive tale to tell about him. He is so familiar as 
often to pursue a fly through the open window into 
my library. 

There is something inexpressibly dear to me in 
these old friendships of a lifetime. There is scarce 
a tree of mine but has had, at some time or other, 
a happy homestead among its boughs, and to which 
I cannot say, 

" Many light hearts and wings, 
Which now be dead, lodged in thy living bowers." 

My walk under the pines would lose half its sum- 
mer charm were I to miss that shy anchorite, the 
Wilson's thrush, nor hear in haying-time the me- 
tallic ring of his song, that justifies his rustic name 
of scythe-wJiet. I protect my game as jealously as 
an English squire. If anybody had oologized a 
certain cuckoo's nest I know of (I have a pair in 
my garden every year), it would have left me a 
sore place in my mind for weeks. I love to bring 
these aborigines back to the mansuetude they 
showed to the early voyagers, and before (forgive 
the involuntary pun) they had grown accustomed to 
man and knew his savage ways. And they repay 
your kindness with a sweet familiarity too delicate 
ever to breed contempt. I have made a Penn- 
treaty with them, preferring that to the Puritan 
way with the natives, which converted them to a 



72 MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE 

little Hebraism and a great deal of Medford rum. 
If they will not come near enough to me (as most 
of them will), I bring them close with an opera- 
glass, — a much better weapon than a gun. I 
would not, if I could, convert them from their 
pretty pagan ways. The only one I sometimes 
have savage doubts about is the red squirrel. I 
think he oologizes. I know he eats cherries (we 
counted five of them at one time in a single tree, 
the stones pattering down like the sparse hail that 
preludes a storm), and that he gnaws off the small 
end of pears to get at the seeds. He steals the 
corn from under the noses of my poultry. But 
what would you have ? He will come down upon a 
limb of the tree I am lying under till he is within 
a yard of me. He and his mate will scurry up and 
down the great black-walnut for my diversion, 
chattering like monkeys. Can I sign his death- 
warrant who has tolerated me about his grounds so 
long ? Not I. Let them steal, and welcome. I am 
sure I should, had I had the same bringing up and 
the same temptation. As for the birds, I do not be- 
lieve there is one of them but does more good than 
harm ; and of how many featherless bipeds can 
this be said ? 



A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER 



A GOOD WORD FOE WINTER 

1870 

" Men scarcely know how beautiful fire is," says 
Shelley ; and I am apt to think there are a good 
many other things concerning which their know- 
ledge might be largely increased without becoming 
burdensome. Nor are they altogether reluctant to 
be taught, — not so reluctant, perhaps, as unable, 
— and education is sure to find one fulcrum ready 
to her hand by which to get a purchase on them. 
For most of us, I have noticed, are not without an 
amiable willingness to assist at any spectacle or 
entertainment (loosely so called) for which no fee 
is charged at the door. If special tickets are sent 
us, another element of pleasure is added in a sense 
of privilege and preeminence (pitiably scarce in a 
democracy) so deeply rooted in human nature that 
I have seen people take a strange satisfaction in 
being near of kin to the mute chief personage in 
a funeral. It gave them a moment's advantage 
over the rest of us whose grief was rated at a 
lower place in the procession. But the words " ad- 
mission free " at the bottom of a handbill, though 
holding out no bait of inequality, have yet a singu- 
lar charm for many minds, especially in the coun- 
try. There is something touching in the constancy 



76 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER 

with which men attend free lectures, and in the 
honest patience with which they listen to them. 
He who pays may yawn or shift testily in his seat, 
or even go out with an awful reverberation of criti- 
cism, for he has bought the right to do any or all 
of these and paid for it. But gratuitous hearers 
are anaesthetized to suffering by a sense of virtue. 
They are performing perhaps the noblest, as it is 
one of the most difficult, of human functions in 
getting Something (no matter how small) for 
Nothing. They are not pestered by the awful duty 
of securing their money's worth. They are wast- 
ing time, to do which elegantly and without lassi- 
tude is the highest achievement of civilization. If 
they are cheated, it is, at worst, only of a superflu- 
ous hour which was rotting on their hands. Not 
only is mere amusement made more piquant, but 
instruction more palatable, by this universally rel- 
ished sauce of gratuity. And if the philosophic 
observer finds an object of agreeable contempla- 
tion in the audience, as they listen to a discourse 
on the probability of making missionaries go down 
better with the Feejee-Islanders by balancing the 
hymn-book in one pocket with a bottle of Worces- 
tershire in the other, or to a plea for arming the 
female goriUa with the ballot, he also takes a 
friendly interest in the lecturer, and admires the 
wise economy of Nature who thus contrives an am- 
ple field of honest labor for her bores. Even when 
the insidious hat is passed round after one of these 
eleemosynary feasts, the relish is but heightened by 
a conscientious refusal to disturb the satisfaction's 



A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER 77 

completeness with the rattle of a single contribu- 
tory penny. So fii-mly persuaded am I of this 
gratis-mstinct in our common humanity, that I 
believe I could fill a house by advertising a free 
lecture on Tupper considered as a philosophic poet, 
or on my personal recollections of the late James 
K. Polk. This being so, I have sometimes won- 
dered that the peep-shows which Nature provides 
with such endless variety for her children, and 
to which we are admitted on the bare condition of 
having eyes, should be so generally neglected. To 
be sure, eyes are not so common as people think, 
or poets would be plentier, and perhaps also these 
exhibitions of hers are cheapened in estimation by 
the fact that in enjoying them we are not getting 
the better of anybody else. Your true lovers of 
nature, however, contrive to get even this solace ; 
and Wordsworth, looking upon mountains as his 
own peculiar sweethearts, was jealous of anybody 
else who ventured upon even the most innocent 
flirtation with them. As if such fellows, indeed, 
could pretend to that nicer sense of what-d'ye-call-it 
which was so remarkable in him ! Marry come up ! 
Mountains, no doubt, may inspire a profounder and 
more exclusive passion, but on the whole I am not 
sorry to have been born and bred among more 
domestic scenes, where I can be hospitable with- 
out a pang. I am going to ask you presently to 
take potluck with me at a board where Winter 
shall supply whatever there is of cheer. 

I think the old fellow has hitherto had scant 
justice done him in the main. We make him the 



78 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER 

symbol of old age or death, and think we have set- 
tled the matter. As if old age were never kindly 
as well as frosty ; as if it had no reverend graces 
of its own as good in their way as the noisy imper- 
tinence of childhood, the elbowing self-conceit of 
youth, or the pompous mediocrity of middle life ! 
As if there were anything discreditable in death, 
or nobody had ever longed for it ! Suppose we 
grant that Winter is the sleep of the year, what 
then ? I take it upon me to say that his dreams 
are finer than the best reality of his waking 
rivals. 

*' Sleep, Silence' child, the father of soft Rest," 

is a very agreeable acquaintance, and most of us 
are better employed in his company than anywhere 
else. For my own part, I think Winter a pretty 
wide-awake old boy, and his bluff sincerity and 
hearty ways are more congenial to my mood, and 
more wholesome for me, than any charms of which 
his rivals are capable. Spring is a fickle mistress, 
who either does not know her own mind, or is so 
long in making it up, whether you shall have her 
or not have her, that one gets tired at last of her 
pretty miffs and reconciliations. You go to her to 
be cheered up a bit, and ten to one catch her in 
the sulks, expecting you to find enough good- 
humor for both. After she has become Mrs. 
Summer she grows a little more staid in her de- 
meanor; and her abundant table, where you are 
sure to get the earliest fruits and vegetables of the 
season, is a good foundation for steady friendship ; 
but she has lost that delicious aroma of maiden- 



A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER 79 

hood, and what was delicately rounded grace in 
the girl gives more than hints of something like 
redundance in the matron. Autumn is the poet 
of the family. He gets you up a splendor that you 
would say was made out of real sunset ; but it is 
nothing more than a few hectic leaves, when all is 
done. He is but a sentimentalist, after all ; a 
kind of Lamartine whining along the ancestral ave- 
nues he has made bare timber of, and begging a 
contribution of good-spirits from your own savings 
to keep him in countenance. But Winter has his 
delicate sensibilities too, only he does not make 
them as good as indelicate by thrusting them for- 
ever in your face. He is a better poet than Au- 
tumn, when he has a mind, but, like a truly great 
one as he is, he brings you down to your bare man- 
hood, and bids you understand him out of that, 
with no adventitious helps of association, or he will 
none of you. He does not touch those melancholy 
chords on which Autumn is as great a master as 
Heine. Well, is there no such thing as thrumming 
on them and maundering over them till they get out 
of tune, and you wish some manly hand would 
crash through them and leave them dangling bro- 
kenly forever ? Take Winter as you find him, and 
he turns out to be a thoroughly honest fellow, with 
no nonsense in him, and tolerating none in you, 
which is a great comfort in the long run. He is 
not what they call a genial critic ; but bring a real 
man along with you, and you will find there is a 
crabbed generosity about the old cynic that you 
would not exchange for all the creamy concessions 



80 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER 

of Autumn. " Season of mists and mellow fruit- 
fulness," quotha? That's just it; Winter soon 
blows your head clear of fog and makes you see 
things as they are ; I thank him for it ! The truth 
is, between ourselves, I have a very good opinion 
of the whole family, who always welcome me with- 
out making me feel as if I were too much of a poor 
relation. There ought to be some kind of distance, 
never so little, you know, to give the true relish. 
They are as good company, the worst of them, as 
any I know, and I am not a little flattered by a 
condescension from any one of them ; but I hap- 
pen to hold Winter's retainer, this time, and, like 
an honest advocate, am bound to make as good a 
showing as I can for him, even if it cost a few slurs 
upon the rest of the household. Moreover, Win- 
ter is coming, and one would like to get on the 
blind side of him. 

The love of Nature in and for herself, or as a 
mirror for the moods of the mind, is a modern 
thing. The fleeing to her as an escape from man 
was brought into fashion by Rousseau ; for his 
prototype Petrarch, though he had a taste for 
pretty scenery, had a true antique horror for the 
'grander aspects of nature. He got once to the 
top of Mont Ventoux, but it is very plain that he 
did not enjoy it. Indeed, it is only within a cen- 
tury or so that the search after the picturesque 
has been a safe employment. It is not so even 
now in Greece or Southern Italy. Where the An- 
glo-Saxon carves his cold fowl, and leaves the relics 
of his picnic, the ancient or mediaeval man might 



A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER 81 

be pretty confident that some ruffian would try the 
edge of his knife on a chicken of the Platonic sort, 
and leave more precious bones as an offering to 
the genius of the place. The ancients were cer- 
tainly more social than we, though that, perhaps, 
was natural enough, when a good part of the world 
was still covered with forest. They huddled to- 
gether in cities as well for safety as to keep their 
minds warm. The Romans had a fondness for 
country life, but they had fine roads, and Rome 
was always within easy reach. The author of the 
Book of Job is the earliest I know of who showed 
any profound sense of the moral meaning of the 
outward world ; and I think none has approached 
him since, though Wordsworth comes nearest with 
the first two books of the " Prelude." But their 
feeling is not precisely of the kind I speak of as 
modern, and which gave rise to what is called de- 
scriptive poetry. Chaucer opens his Clerk's Tale 
with a bit of landscape admirable for its large 
style, and as well composed as any Claude. 

'' There is right at the west end of Itaille, 
Down at the root of Vesulus the cold, 
A lusty plain abundant of vitaille, 
Where many a tower and town thou mayst heboid, 
That founded were in time of fathers old, 
And many an other delectable sight ; 
And Sdluces this noble country hight." 

What an airy precision of touch there is here, 
and what a sure eye for the points of character 
in landscape ! But the picture is altogether sub- 
sidiary. No doubt the works of Salvator Rosa 
and Gaspar Poussin show that there must have 



82 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER 

been some amateur taste for tlie grand and terrible 
in scenery ; but the British poet Thomson (" sweet- 
souled " is Wordsworth's apt word) was the first 
to do with words what they had done partially with 
colors. He was turgid, no good metrist, and his 
English is like a translation from one of those 
poets who wrote in Latin after it was dead ; but 
he was a man of sincere genius, and not only Eng- 
lish, but European literature is largely in his 
debt. He was the inventor of cheap amusement 
for the million, to be had of All-out-doors for the 
asking. It was his impulse which unconsciously 
gave direction to Rousseau, and it is to the school 
of Jean Jacques that we owe St. Pierre, Cowper, 
Chateaubriand, Wordsworth, Byron, Lamartine, 
George Sand, Ruskin, — the great painters of 
ideal landscape. 

So long as men had slender means, whether of 
keeping out cold or checkmating it with artificial 
heat. Winter was an unwelcome guest, especially 
in the country. There he was the bearer of a lettre 
de cachet^ which shut its victims in solitary con- 
finement with few resources but to boose round the 
fire and repeat ghost-stories, which had lost all 
their freshness and none of their terror. To go to 
bed was to lie awake of cold, with an added shudder 
of fright whenever a loose casement or a waving cur^ 
tain chose to give you the goose-flesh. Bussy Ra- 
butin, in one of his letters, gives us a notion how 
uncomfortable it was in the country, with green 
wood, smoky chimneys, and doors and windows that 
thought it was their duty to make the wind whistle, 



A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER 83 

not to keep it out. With fuel so dear, it could not 
have been much better in the city, to judge by 
Menage's warning against the danger of our dress- 
ing-gowns taking fire, while we cuddle too closely 
over the sparing blaze. The poet of Winter himself 
is said to have written in bed, with his hand through 
a hole in the blanket ; and we may suspect that it 
was the warmth quite as much as the company that 
first drew men together at the coffee-house. Cole- 
ridge, in January, 1800, writes to Wedgewood: 
'' I am sitting b}^ a fire in a rug great-coat. . . . 
It is most barbarously cold, and you, I fear, can 
shield yourself from it only by perpetual imprison- 
ment." This thermometrical view of winter is, I 
grant, a depressing one ; for I think there is nothing 
so demoralizing as cold. I know of a boy who, when 
his father, a bitter economist, was brought home 
dead, said only, " Now we can burn as much wood 
as we like." I would not off-hand prophesy the 
gallows for that boy. I remember with a shud- 
der a pinch I got from the cold once in a railroad- 
car. A born fanatic of fresh air, I found myself 
glad to see the windows hermetically sealed by 
the freezing vapor of our breath, and plotted the 
assassination of the conductor every time he opened 
the door. I felt myself sensibly barbarizing, and 
would have shared Colonel Jack's bed in the ash-hole 
of the glass-furnace with a grateful heart. Since 
then I have had more charity for the prevailing 
ill-opinion of winter. It was natural enough that 
Ovid should measure the years of his exile in Pon- 
tus by the number of winters. 



84: A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER 

Ut sumus in Ponto, ter frigore constitit Ister, 
Facta est Eiixini dura ter unda maris : 

Thrice hath the cold bound Ister fast, since I 
In Pontus was, thrice Euxine's wave made hard. 

Jubinal has printed an Anglo-Norman piece of 
doggerel in which Winter and Summer dispute 
which is the better man. It is not without a kind 
of rough and inchoate humor, and I like it 
because old Whitebeard gets tolerably fair play. 
The jolly old fellow boasts of his rate of living, 
with that contempt of poverty which is the weak 
spot in the burly English nature. 

J^ Dieu ne place que me avyenge 
Que ne face plus honour 
Et plus despenz en un soul jour 
Que vus en tote Tostre vie : 

Now God forbid it hap to me 
That I make not more great display, 
And spend more in a single day 
Than you can do in all your life. 

The best touch, perhaps, is Winter's claim for 
credit as a mender of the highways, which was not 
without point when every road in Europe was a 
quagmire during a good part of the year unless it 
was bottomed on some remains of Roman engineer- 
ing. 

Je su, fet-il, seignur et mestre 
Et k bon droit le dey estre, 
Quant de la bo we face cauc^ 
Par un petit de geel^ : 

Master and lord I am, says he, 
And of good right so ought to be, 
Since I make causeys, safely crost, 
Of mud, with just a pinch of frost. 



A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER 85 

But there is no recognition of Winter as tlie best 
of out-door company. 1 

Even Emerson, an open-air man, and a bringer 
of it, if ever any, confesses, 

*' The frost-king- ties my fumbling feet, 
Sings in ray ear, my hands are stones, 
Curdles the blood to the marble bones, 
Tugs at the heartstring-s, numbs the sense, 
And hems in life with narrowing fence." 

Winter was literally " the inverted year," as 
Thomson called him ; for such entertainments as 
could be had must be got within doors. What 
cheerfulness there was in brumal verse was that of 
Horace's dissolve frigus ligna super foco large re- 
ponens^ so pleasantly associated with the cleverest 
scene in Roderick Random. This is the tone of 
that poem of Walton's friend Cotton, which won 
the praise of Wordsworth : — 

" Let us home, 
Our mortal enemy is come ; 
Winter and all his blustering train 
Have made a voyage o'er the main. 



" Fly, fly, the foe advances fast; 
Into our fortress let us haste. 
Where all the roarers of the north 
Can neither storm nor starve us forth. 

*' There underground a magazine 
Of sovereign juice is cellared in, 

^ Mais vous Yver, trop estes plain 
De n^ge, vent, pluye, e gr^zil ; 
Ou vous deust bannir en exil ; 
Sans point flater, je parle plain, 
Yver, vous n'estes qu'un vilain. 

Ch. d^ Orleans, Chans, xciv. 



86 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER 

Liquor that will the siege maintain 
Should Phcsbus ne'er return again. 



" Whilst we together jovial sit 
Careless, and crowned with mirth and wit, 
Where, though bleak winds confine us home, 
Our fancies round the world shall roam." 

Thomson's view of Winter is also, on tlie whole, a 
hostile one, though he does justice to his grandeur. 

" Thus Winter falls, 
A heavy gloom oppressive o'er the world. 
Through Nature shedding influence malign." 

He finds his consolations, like Cotton, in the house, 
though more refined : — 

" While without 
The ceaseless winds blow ice, be my retreat 
Between the groaning forest and the shore 
Beat by the boundless multitude of waves, 
A rural, sheltered, solitary scene. 
Where ruddy fire and beaming tapers join 
To cheer the gloom. There studious let me sit 
And hold high converse with the mighty dead." 

Doctor Akenside, a man to be spoken of with re- 
spect, follows Thomson. With him, too, " Winter 
desolates the year," and 

*' How pleasing wears the wintry night 
Spent with the old illustrious dead ! 
While by the taper's trembling light 
I seem those awful scenes to tread 
Where chiefs or legislators lie," &e. 

Akenside had evidently been reading Thomson. 
He had the conceptions of a great poet with less 
faculty than many a little one, and is one of those 
versifiers of whom it is enough to say that we are 
always willing to break him off in the middle (as I 



A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER 87 

have ventured to do) with an &c., well knowing that 
what follows is but the coming-round again of what 
went before, marching in a circle with the cheap 
numerosity of a stage-array. In truth, it is no 
wonder that the short days of that cloudy northern 
climate should have added to winter a gloom bor- 
rowed of the mind. We hardly know, till we have 
experienced the contrast, how sensibly our winter 
is alleviated by the longer daylight and the pellucid 
atmosphere. I once spent a winter in Dresden, 
a southern climate compared with England, and 
really almost lost my respect for the sun when I 
saw him groping among the chimney-pots opposite 
my windows as he described his impoverished arc 
in the sky. The enforced seclusion of the season 
makes it the time for serious study and occupations 
that demand fixed incomes of unbroken time. This 
is why Milton said "that his vein never happily 
flowed but from the autumnal equinox to the ver- 
nal," though in his twentieth year he had written, 
on the return of spring, — 

Fallor ? an et nobis redeunt in carmina vires 
Ingeuiumque mihi mvinere veris adest ? 
Err I ? or do the powers of song return 
To me, and genius too, the gifts of Spring ? 

Goethe, so far as I remember, was the first to 
notice the cheerfulness of snow in sunshine. His 
Harz-reise im Winter gives no hint of it, for that 
is a diluted reminiscence of Greek tragic choruses 
and the Book of Job in nearly equal parts. ^ In 
one of the singularly interesting and characteristic 
letters to Frau von Stein, however, written during 



88 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER 

the journey, he says : " It is beautiful indeed ; the 
mist heaps itself together in light snow-clouds, the 
sun looks through, and the snow over everything 
gives back a feeling of gayety." But I find in 
Cowper the first recognition of a general amiabil- 
ity in Winter. The gentleness of his temper, and 
the wide charity of his sympathies, made it natural 
for him to find good in everything except the hu- 
man heart. A dreadful creed distilled from the 
darkest moments of dyspeptic solitaries compelled 
him against his will to see in that the one evil thing 
made by a God whose goodness is over all his 
works. Cowper's two walks in the morning and 
noon of a winter's day are delightful, so long as he 
contrives to let himself be happy in the gracious- 
ness of the landscape. Your muscles grow springy, 
and your lungs dilate with the crisp air as you 
walk along with him. You laugh with him at the 
grotesque shadow of your legs lengthened across 
the snow by the just-risen sun. I know nothing 
that gives a purer feeling of out-door exhilaration 
than the easy verses of this escaped hypochondriac. 
But Cowper also preferred his sheltered garden- 
walk to those robuster joys, and bitterly acknow- 
ledged the depressing influence of the darkened 
year. In December, 1780, he writes : " At this 
season of the year, and in this gloomy uncomfort- 
able climate, it is no easy matter for the owner of 
a mind like mine to divert it from sad subjects, and 
to fix it upon such as may administer to its amuse- 
ment." Or was it because he was writing to the 
dreadful Newton ? Perhaps his poetry bears truer 



A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER 89 

witness to his habitual feeling, for it is only there 
that poets disenthral themselves of their reserve 
and become fully possessed of their greatest charm, 
— the power of being franker than other men. In 
the Third Book of the Task he boldly affirms his 
preference of the country to the city even in win- 
ter : — 

" But are not wholesome airs, though unperf umed 
By roses, and clear suns, though scarcely felt, 
And groves, if inharmonious, yet secure 
From clamor, and whose very silence charms, 
To be preferred to smoke ? . . . 
They would be, were not madness in the head 
And folly in the heart ; were England now 
What England was, plain, hospitable, kind, 
And undebauched." 

The conclusion shows, however, that he was 
thinking mainly of fireside delights, not of the 
blusterous companionship of nature. This appears 
even more clearly in the Fourth Book : — 

" O Winter, ruler of the inverted year" ; 

but I cannot help interrupting him to say how pleas- 
ant it always is to track poets through the gardens 
of their predecessors and find out their likings by 
a flower snapped off here and there to garnish their 
own nosegays. Cowper had been reading Thom- 
son, and " the inverted year " pleased his fancy 
with its suggestion of that starry wheel of the zo- 
diac moving round through its spaces infinite. He 
could not help loving a handy Latinism (especially 
with elision beauty added), any more than Gray, 
any more than Wordsworth, — on the sly. But 
the member for Olney has the floor : — 



90 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER 

" O Winter, ruler of tte inverted year, 

Thy scattered hair with sleet like ashes filled, 

Thy breath congealed upon thy lips, thy cheeks 

Friag-ed with a beard made white with other snows 

Than those of age, thy forehead wrapt in clouds, 

A leafless branch thy sceptre, and thy throne 

A sliding' car, indebted to no wheels. 

But urged by storms along' its slippery way, 

I love thee all unlovely as thou seem'st, 

And dreaded as thou art ! Thou hold'st the sun 

A prisoner in the yet undawning east. 

Shortening his journey between morn and noon. 

And hurrying him, impatient of his stay, 

Down to the rosy west, but kindly still 

Compensating his loss with added hours 

Of social converse and instructive ease. 

And gathering at short notice, in one group, 

The family dispersed, and fixing thought, 

Not less dispersed by daylight and its cares. 

I crown thee king of intimate delights, 

Fireside enjoyments, homeborn happiness, 

And all the comforts that the lowly roof 

Of undisturbed Retirement, and the hours 

Of long uninterrupted evening know." 

I call this a good human bit of w^tiiig, imagina- 
tive, too, — not so flushed, not so . . . highf akiting 
(let me dare the odious word !) as the modern style 
since poets have got hold of a theory that imagina- 
tion is common-sense turned inside out, and not 
common-sense sublimed, — but wholesome, mascu- 
line, and strong in the simplicity of a mind wholly 
occupied with its theme. To me Cowper is still 
the best of our descriptive poets for every-day wear. 
And what unobtrusive skill he has ! How he 
heightens, for example, your sense of winter-evening 
seclusion, by the twanging horn of the postman on 
the bridge ! That horn has rung in my ears ever 



A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER 91 

since I first beard it, during the consulate of the 
second Adams. Wordsworth strikes a deeper note ; 
but does it not sometimes come over one (just the 
least in the world) that one would give anything 
for a bit of nature pure and simple, without quite 
so strong a flavor of W. W. ? W. W. is, of course, 
sublime and all that — but ! For my part, I will 
make a clean breast of it, and confess that I can't 
look at a mountain without fancying the late lau- 
reate's gigantic Roman nose thrust between me and 
it, and thinking of Dean Swift's profane version of 
Homanos rerum dominos into Roman nose ! a rare 
un ! dom your nose ! But do I judge verses, then, 
by the impression made on me by the man who 
wrote them? Not so fast, my good friend, but, 
for good or evil, the character and its intellectual 
product are inextricably interfused. 

If I remember aright, Wordsworth himself (ex- 
cept in his magnificent skating-scene in the " Pre- 
lude ") has not much to say for winter out of 
doors. I cannot recall any picture by him of a 
snow-storm. The reason may possibly be that in 
the Lake Country even the winter storms bring 
rain rather than snow. He was thankful for the 
Christmas visits of Crabb Robinson, because they 
" helped him through the winter." His only hearty 
praise of winter is when, as General Fevrier, he 
defeats the French : — 

"Humanity, delighting to behold 
A fond reflection of her own decay, 
Hath painted Winter like a traveller old, 
Propped on a staff, and, through the sullen day, 
In hooded mantle, limping o'er the plain 



92 A GOOD WORD FOR WIJSTER 

As though his weakness were disturbed by pain: 
Or, if a juster fancy should allow 
An undisputed symbol of command, 
The chosen sceptre is a withered bough 
Infirmly grasped within a withered hand. 
These emblems suit the helpless and forlorn ; 
But mighty Winter the device shall scorn." 

The Scottish poet Grahame, in his " Sabbath," 
says manfully : — 

"Now is the time 
To visit Nature in her grand attire " ; 

and he has one little picture which no other poet 
has surpassed : — 

" High-ridged the whirled drift has almost reached 
The powdered keystone of the churchyard porch : 
Mute hangs the hooded bell ; the tombs lie buried." 

Even in our own climate, where the sun shows his 
winter face as long and as brightly as in central 
Italy, the seduction of the chimney-corner is apt to 
predominate in the mind over the severer satisfac- 
tions of muffled fields and penitential woods. The 
very title of Whittier's delightful " Snow-Bound '* 
shows what he was thinking of, though he does 
vapor a little about digging out paths. The verses 
of Emerson, perfect as a Greek fragment (despite 
the archaism of a dissyllabic fire), which he has 
chosen for his epigraph, tell us, too, how the 

* ' Housemates sit 
Around the radiant fireplace, enclosed 
In a tumultuous privacy of storm. ' ' 

They are all in a tale. It is always the tristis 
Hiems of Virgil. Catch one of them having a 
kind word for old Barbe Fleurie, unless he whines 



A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER 93 

through some cranny, like a beggar, to heighten 
their enjoyment while they toast their slippered 
toes. I grant there is a keen relish of contrast 
about the bickering flame as it gives an emphasis 
beyond Gherardo della Notte to loved faces, or 
kindles the gloomy gold of volumes scarce less 
friendly, especially when a tempest is blundering 
round the house. Wordsworth has a fine touch 
that brings home to us the comfortable contrast of 
without and within, during a storm at night, and 
the passage is highly characteristic of a poet whose 
inspiration always has an undertone of bourgeois : 

** How touching", when, at midnight, sweep 
Snow-muffled v/inds, and all is dark. 
To hear, — and sink again to sleep ! " 

J. H., one of those choice poets who will not tar- 
nish their bright fancies by publication, always in- 
sists on a snow-storm as essential to the true at- 
mosphere of whist. Mrs. Battles, in her famous 
rule for the game, implies winter, and would doubt- 
less have added tempest, if it could be had for the 
asking. For a good solid read also, into the small 
hours, there is nothing like that sense of safety 
against having your evening laid waste, which Eu- 
roclydon brings, as he bellows down the chimney, 
making your fire gasp, or rustles snow-flakes against 
the pane with a sound more soothing than silence. 
Emerson, as he is apt to do, not only hit the nail 
on the head, but drove it home, in that last phrase 
of the " tumultuous privacy." 

But I would exchange this, and give something 
to boot, for the privilege of walking out into the 



94 



^^f^t. jwa get 



- eofff cl 
-^'s pie- 



A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER 95 

Chapman, after all. though he makes very freo 
with him, comes nearer Homer than anybody else. 
There is nothing in the original of that fair snow's 
tender flakes, but neither Pope nor Cowper coidd 
get out of their heads the Psalmist's tender phrase, 
'• He oriveth his snow like wool,*' for which also 
Homer affords no hint. Pope talks of - dissoh-ing 
fleeces," and Cowper of a -fleecy mantle." But 
David is nobly simple, while Pope is simply non- 
sensical, and Cowper pretty. If they must have 
prettiness, Martial would have supplied them with 
it in his 

Denstun tacitarum vellus aqnarttm, 

which is too pretty, though I fear it would have 
pleased Dr. Donne. Eustathius of Thessalonica 
calls snow I'dcup epioj^es, woolly water, which a poor 
old French poet, Godeau, has ampHfied into this : 

Lorsque la froidure Lahumaine 
De leur verd ornement depouille les forets 
Soils une neige ^paisse il couvre les gnerets, 
Et la neige a pour eux la chaleur de la laine. 

In this, as in Pope's version of the passage in Ho- 
mer, there is, at least, a sort of suggestion of snow- 
storm in the blinding drift of words. But, on the 
whole, if one woidd know what snow is, I should 
advise him not to hunt up what the poets have said 
about it, but to look at the sweet miracle itself. 

The preludings of Winter are as beautifid as 
those of Spring. In a gray December day, when, 
as the farmers say, it is too cold to snow, his 
numbed fingrers will let fall doubtfully a few star- 
shaped flakes, the snow-drops and anemones that 



96 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER 

harbinger his more assured reign. Now, and now 
only, may be seen, heaped on the horizon's eastern 
edge, those " blue clouds " from forth which Shake- 
speare says that Mars " doth pluck the masoned 
turrets." Sometimes also, when the sun is low, you 
will see a single cloud trailing a flurry of snow 
along the southern hills in a w^avering fringe of 
purple. And when at last the real snow-storm 
comes, it leaves the earth with a virginal look on it 
that no other of the seasons can rival, — compared 
with which, indeed, they seem soiled and vulgar. 

And what is there in nature so beautiful as the 
next morning after such confusion of the elements ? 
Night has no silence like this of busy day. All the 
batteries of noise are spiked. We see the move- 
ment of life as a deaf man sees it, a mere wraith 
of the clamorous existence that inflicts itself on our 
ears when the ground is bare. The earth is clothed 
in innocence as a garment. Every wound of the 
landscape is healed ; whatever was stiff has been 
sweetly rounded as the breasts of Aphrodite ; what 
was unsightly has been covered gently with a soft 
splendor, as if, Cowley would have said. Nature 
had cleverly let fall her handkerchief to hide it. 
If the Virgin (^Notre Dame de la Neige) were to 
come back, here is an earth that would not bruise 
her foot nor stain it. It is 

" The fanned snow 
That's bolted by the northern blasts twice o'er," — 
(Soffiata e stretta dai venti Schiavi,) 
Winnowed and packed by the Sclavonian winds, — 

packed so hard sometimes on hill-slopes that it will 



A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER 97 

bear your weight. What grace is in all the curves, 
as if every one of them had been swept by that in- 
spired thumb of Phidias's journeyman ! 

Poets have fancied the footprints of the wind in 
those light ripples that sometimes scurry across 
smooth water with a sudden blur. But on this 
gleaming hush the aerial deluge has left plain 
marks of its course ; and in gullies through which 
it rushed torrent-like, the eye finds its bed irregu- 
larly scooped like that of a brook in hard beach- 
sand, or, in more sheltered spots, traced with out- 
lines like those left by the sliding edges of the surf 
upon the shore. The air, after all, is only an in- 
finitely thinner kind of water, such as I suppose we 
shall have to drink when the state does her whole 
duty as a moral reformer. Nor is the wind the only 
thing whose trail you will notice on this sensitive 
surface. You will find that you have more neigh- 
bors and night visitors than you dreamed of. Here 
is the dainty footprint of a cat; here a dog has 
looked in on you like an amateur watchman to see 
if all is right, slumping clumsily about in the mealy 
treachery. And look ! before you were up in the 
morning, though you were a punctual courtier at 
the sun's levee, here has been a squirrel zigzagging 
to and fro like a hound gathering the scent, and 
some tiny bird searching for unimaginable food, — 
perhaps for the tinier creature, whatever it is, that 
drew this slender continuous trail like those made 
on the wet beach by light borderers of the sea. 
The earliest autographs were as frail as these. 
Poseidon traced his lines, or giant birds made their 



98 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER 

mark, on preadamite sea-margins; and the tliim- 
der-gust left the tear-stains of its sudden passion 
there; nay, we have the signatures of delicatest 
fern-leaves on the soft ooze of aeons that dozed 
away their dreamless leisure before consciousness 
came upon the earth with man. Some whim of 
nature locked them fast in stone for us after- 
thoughts of creation. Which of us shall leave a 
footprint as imperishable as that of the ornitho- 
rhynchus, or much more so than that of these Be- 
douins of the snow-desert? Perhaps it was only 
because the ripple and the rain-drop and the bird 
were not thinking of themselves, that they had such 
luck. The chances of immortality depend very 
much on that. How often have we not seen poor 
mortals, dupes of a season's notoriety, carving their 
names on seeming-solid rock of merest beach-sand, 
whose feeble hold on memory shall be washed away 
by the next wave of fickle opinion! Well, well, 
honest Jacques, there are better things to be found 
in the snow than sermons. 

The snow that falls damp comes commonly in 
larger flakes from windless skies, and is the pretti- 
est of all to watch from under cover. This is the 
kind Homer had in mind; and Dante, who had 
never read him, compares the dilatate falde^ the 
flaring flakes, of his fiery rain, to those of snow 
among the mountains without wind. This sort of 
snowfall has no fight in it, and does not challenge 
you to a wrestle like that which drives well from 
the northward, with all moisture thoroughly win- 
nowed out of it by the frosty wind. Burns, who 



A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER 99 

was more out of doors than most poets, and whose 
barefoot Muse got the color in her cheeks by vig- 
orous exercise in all weathers, was thinking of this 
drier deluge, when he speaks of the "whirling 
drift," and tells how 

" Chanticleer 
Shook off the powthery snaw." 

But the damper and more deliberate falls have a 
choice knack at draping the trees ; and about eaves 
or stone-walls, wherever, indeed, the evaporation is 
rapid, and it finds a chance to cling, it will build 
itself out in curves of wonderful beauty. I have 
seen one of these dumb waves, thus caught in the 
act of breaking, curl four feet beyond the edge of 
my roof and hang there for days, as if Nature were 
too well pleased with her work to let it crumble 
from its exquisite pause. After such a storm, if 
you are lucky enough to have even a sluggish ditch 
for a neighbor, be sure to pay it a visit. You will 
find its banks corniced with what seems precip- 
itated light, and the dark current down below 
gleams as if with an inward lustre. Dull of motion 
as it is, you never saw water that seemed alive be- 
fore. It has a brightness, like that of the eyes of 
some smaller animals, which gives assurance of life, 
but of a life foreign and unintelligible. 

A damp snow-storm often turns to rain, and, in 
our freakish climate, the wind will whisk sometimes 
into the northwest so suddenly as to plate all the 
trees with crystal before it has swept the sky clear 
of its last cobweb of cloud. Ambrose Philips, 
in a poetical epistle from Copenhagen to the Earl 



« AC r 



100 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER 

of Dorset, describes this strange confectionery of 
Nature, — for such, I am half ashamed to say, it 
always seems to me, recalling the *' glorified sugar- 
cancjy " of Lamb's first night at the theatre. It 
has an artificial air, altogether beneath the grand 
artist of the atmosphere, and besides does too much 
mischief to the trees for a philodendrist to take un- 
mixed pleasure in it. Perhaps it deserves a poet 
like Philips, who really loved Nature and yet liked 
her to be mighty fine, as Pepys would say, with a 
heightening of powder and rouge : — 

" And yet but lately have I seen e'en here 
The winter in a lovely dress appear. 
Ere yet the clouds let fall the treasured snow, 
Or winds begun throug-h hazy skies to blow, 
At evening a keen eastern breeze arose, 
And the descending rain unsullied froze. 
Soon as the silent shades of night withdrew, 
The ruddy noon disclosed at once to view 
The face of Nature in a rich disguise, 
And brightened every object to my eyes ; 
For every shrub, and every blade of grass, 
And every pointed thorn, seemed wrought in glass ; 
In pearls and rubies rich the hawthorns show, 
And through the ice the crimson berries glow ; 
The thick-sprung reeds, which watery marshes yieU, 
Seem polished lances in a hostile field ; 
The stag in limpid currents with surprise 
Sees crystal branches on his forehead rise ; 
The spreading oak, the beech, the towering pine, 
Glazed over in the freezing ether shine ; 
The frighted birds the rattling branches shun. 
Which wave and glitter in the distant sun, 
When, if a sudden gust of wind arise, 
The brittle forest into atoms flies. 
The crackling wood beneath the tempest bends 
And in a spangled shower the prospect ends." 



A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER 101 

It is not uninstructive to see how tolerable Am- 
brose is, so long as he sticks manfully to what he 
really saw. The moment he undertakes to im- 
prove on Nature he sinks into the mere court poet, 
and we surrender him to the jealousy of Pope with- 
out a sigh. His " rattling branches," " crackling 
wood," and crimson berries glowing through the ice 
are good, as truth always is after a fashion ; but 
what shall we say of that dreadful stag which, 
there is little doubt, he valued above all the rest, 
because it was purely his own ? 

The damper snow tempts the amateur architect 
and sculptor. His Pentelicus has been brought to 
his very door, and if there are boys to be had 
(whose company beats all other recipes for prolong- 
ing life) a middle-aged Master of the Works will 
knock the years off his account and make the fam- 
ily Bible seem a dealer in foolish fables, by a few 
hours given heartily to this business. First comes 
the Sisyphean toil of rolling the clammy balls till 
they refuse to budge farther. Then, if you would 
play the statuary, they are piled one upon the other 
to the proper height ; or if your aim be masonry, 
whether of house or fort, they must be squared and 
beaten solid with the shovel. The material is 
capable of very pretty effects, and your young 
companions meanwhile are unconsciously learning 
lessons in aesthetics. From the feeling of satisfac- 
tion with which one squats on the damp floor of 
his extemporized dwelling, I have been led to think 
that the backwoodsman must get a sweeter savor 
of seK-suf&cingness from the house his own hands 



102 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER 

have built than Bramante or Sansovino could ever 
give. Perhaps the fort is the best thing, for it 
calls out more masculine qualities and adds the 
cheer of battle with that dumb artillery which gives 
pain enough to test pluck without risk of serious 
hurt. Already, as I write, it is twenty-odd years 
ago. The balls fly thick and fast. The uncle de- 
fends the waist-high ramparts against a storm of 
nephews, his breast plastered with decorations like 
another Radetsky's. How well I recall the indom- 
itable good-humor under fire of him who fell in 
the front at Ball's Bluff, the silent pertinacity of 
the gentle scholar who got his last hurt at Fair 
Oaks, the ardor in the charge of the gallant gentle- 
man who, with the death-wound in his side, headed 
his brigade at Cedar Creek ! How it all comes 
back, and they never come ! I cannot again be 
the Yauban of fortresses in the innocent snow, but 
I shall never see children moulding their clumsy 
giants in it without longing to help. It was a 
pretty fancy of the young Vermont sculptor to 
make his first essay in this evanescent material. 
Was it a figure of Youth, I wonder? Would it not 
be weU if all artists could begin in stuff as perish- 
able, to melt away when the sun of prosperity be- 
gan to shine, and leave nothing behind but the 
gain of practised hands ? It is pleasant to fancy 
that Shakespeare served his apprenticeship at this 
trade, and owed to it that most pathetic of despair- 
ing wishes, — 

* ' O, that I were a mockery-king' of snow, 
Standing before the sun of Bolingbroke, 
To melt myself away in water-drops ! " 



A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER 103 

I have spoken of the exquisite curves of snow 
surfaces. Not less rare are the tints of which they 
are capable, — the faint blue of the hollows, for the 
shadows in snow are always blue, and the tender 
rose of higher points, as you stand with your back 
to the setting sun and look upward across the soft 
rondure of a hillside. I have seen within a mile of 
home eifects of color as lovely as any iridescence 
of the Silberhorn after sundown. Charles II., who 
never said a foolish thing, gave the English climate 
the highest praise when he said that it allowed you 
more hours out of doors than any other, and I 
think our winter may fairly make the same boast 
as compared with the rest of the year. Its still 
mornings, with the thermometer near zero, put a 
premium on walking. There is more sentiment in 
turf, perhaps, and it is more elastic under the foot; 
its silence, too, is wellnigh as congenial with medi- 
tation as that of fallen pine-tassel ; but for exhil- 
aration there is nothing like a stiff snow-crust that 
creaks like a cricket at every step, and communi- 
cates its own sparkle to the senses. The air you 
drink is frappe, all its grosser particles precipi- 
tated, and the dregs of your blood with them. A 
purer current mounts to the brain, courses spar- 
kling through it, and rinses it thoroughly of all 
dejected stuff. There is nothing left to breed 
an exhalation of ill-humor or despondency. They 
say that this rarefied atmosphere has lessened the 
capacity of our lungs. Be it so. Quart-pots are 
for muddier liquor than nectar. To me, the city 
in winter is infinitely dreary, — the sharp street- 



104 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER 

corners have such a chill in them, and the snow so 
soon loses its maidenhood to become a mere drab, 
— " doing shameful things," as Steele says of poli- 
ticians, " without being ashamed." I pine for the 
Quaker purity of my country landscape. I am 
speaking, of course, of those winters that are not 
niggardly of snow, as ours too often are, giving us 
a gravelly dust instead. Nothing can be unsight- 
lier than those piebald fields where the coarse 
brown hide of Earth shows through the holes of 
her ragged ermine. But even when there is abun- 
dance of snow, I find as I grow older that there 
are not so many good crusts as there used to be. 
When I first observed this, I rashly set it to the 
account of that general degeneracy in nature (keep- 
ing pace with the same melancholy phenomenon in 
man) which forces itself upon the attention and 
into the philosophy of middle life. But happen- 
ing once to be weighed, it occurred to me that an 
arch which would bear fifty pounds could hardly 
be blamed for giving way under more than three 
times the weight. I have sometimes thought 
that if theologians would remember this in their 
arguments, and consider that the man may slump 
through, with no fault of his own, where the 
boy would have skimmed the surface in safety, it 
would be better for all parties. However, when 
you do get a crust that will bear, and know any 
brooklet that runs down a hillside, be sure to go 
and take a look at him, especially if your crust is 
due, as it commonly is, to a cold snap following 
eagerly on a thaw. You will never find him so 



A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER 105 

cheerful. As he shrank away after the last thaw, 
he built for himseK the most exquisite caverns of 
ice to run through, if not " measureless to man " 
like those of Alph, the sacred river, yet perhaps 
more pleasing for their narrowness than those for 
their grandeur. What a cunning silversmith is 
Frost ! The rarest workmanship of Delhi or Genoa 
copies him but clumsily, as if the fingers of all 
other artists were thumbs. Fernwork and lace- 
work and filigree in endless variety, and under it 
all the water tinkles like a distant guitar, or drums 
like a tambourine, or gurgles like the Tokay of an 
anchorite's dream. Beyond doubt there is a fairy 
procession marching along those frail arcades and 
translucent corridors. 

" Their oaten pipes blow wondrous shrill, 
The hemlocks small blow clear." 

And hark ! is that the ringing of Titania's bridle, 
or the bells of the wee, wee hawk that sits on Obe- 
ron's wrist? This wonder of Frost's handiwork 
may be had every winter, but he can do better than 
this, though I have seen it but once in my life. 
There had been a thaw without wind or rain, mak- 
ing the air fat with gray vapor. Towards sundown 
came that chill, the avant-courier of a northwesterly 
gale. Then, though there was no perceptible cur- 
rent in the atmosphere, the fog began to attach it- 
self in frosty roots and filaments to the southern 
side of every twig and grass-stem. The very posts 
had poems traced upon them by this dumb min- 
strel. Wherever the moist seeds found lodgement 
grew an inch-deep moss fine as cobweb, a slender 



106 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER 

coral-reef, argentine, delicate, as of some silent sea 
in the moon, such as Agassiz dredges when he 
dreams. The frost, too, can wield a delicate graver, 
and in fancy leaves Piranesi far behind. He cov- 
ers your window-pane with Alpine etchings, as if 
in memory of that sanctuary where he finds shelter 
even in midsummer. 

Now look down from your hillside across the 
valley. The trees are leafless, but this is the sea- 
son to study their anatomy, and did you ever no- 
tice before how much color there is in the twigs of 
many of them ? And the smoke from those chim- 
neys is so blue it seems like a feeder of the sky 
into which it flows. Winter refines it and gives 
it agreeable associations. In summer it suggests 
cookery or the drudgery of steam-engines, but now 
your fancy (if it can forget for a moment the 
dreary usurpation of stoves) traces it down to the 
fireside and the brightened faces of children. Tho- 
reau is the only poet who has fitly sung it. The 
wood-cutter rises before day and 

" First in the dusky dawn he sends abroad 
His early scout, his emissary, smoke, 
The earliest, latest pilgrim from his roof, 
To feel the frosty air ; ... 
And, while he crouches still beside the hearth, 
Nor musters courage to unbar the door, 
It has gone down the glen with the light wind 
And o'er the plain unfurled its venturous wreath., 
Draped the tree-tops, loitered upon the hill, 
And warmed the pinions of the early bird ; 
And now, perchance, high in the crispy air, 
Has caught sight of the day o'er the earth's edg-e, 
And greets its master's eye at his low door 
As some refulgent cloud in the upper sky." 



A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER 107 

Here is very bad verse and very good imagination. 
He had been reading Wordsworth, or he would 
not have made tree-tops an iambus. In reading it 
over again I am bound to say that I have never 
seen smoke that became a refulgent cloud in the 
upper sky anywhere but in London. In the More- 
turn of Virgil (or, if not his, better than most of 
his) is a pretty picture of a peasant kindling his 
winter-morning fire. He rises before dawn, 

Sollicitaque manu tenebras explorat inertes 
Vestigatque f oeura laesus quem denique sensit. 
Parvulus exusto remanebat stipite f umus, 
Et cinis obductae celabat lumina prunse. 
Admovet his pronam submissa fronte lucemam, 
Et producit acu stupas humore carentes, 
Excitat et crebris lang-uentem flatibus ignem ; 
Tandem concepto tenebrse fvilgore recedunt, 
Oppositaque manu lumen def endit ab aura. 

With cautious hand he gropes the sluggish dark, 
Tracking the hearth -which, scorched, he feels erelong. 
In burnt-out logs a slender smoke remained, 
And raked-up ashes hid the cinders' eyes ; 
Stooping, to these the lamp outstretched he neara, 
And, with a needle loosening the dry wick. 
With frequent breath excites the languid flame. 
Before the gathering glow the shades recede, 
And his bent hand the new-caught light defends. 

Ovid heightens the picture by a single touch : — 

Ipse genu posito flammas exsuscitat aura. 
Kneeling, his breath calls back to life the flames. 

If you walk down now into the woods, you may 
find a robin or a bluebird among the red-cedars, 
or a nuthatch scaling deviously the trunk of some 
hardwood tree with an eye as keen as that of a 



108 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER 

French soldier foraging for the pot-au-feu of his 
mess. Perhaps a blue- jay shrills cah cah in his 
corvine trebles, or a chickadee 

*' Shows feats of his gyinnastic play, 
Head downward, clinging to the spray." 

But both him and the snow-bird I love better to 
see, tiny fluffs of feathered life, as they scurry about 
in a driving mist of snow, than in this serene air. 

Coleridge has put into verse one of the most 
beautiful phenomena of a winter walk : — 

" The woodman winding westward up the glen 
At wintry dawn, where o'er the sheep-track's maze 
The viewless snow-mist weaves a glistening haze, 
Sees full before him, gliding without tread, 
An image with a halo round its head." 

But this aureole is not peculiar to winter. I have 
noticed it often in a summer morning, when the 
grass was heavy with dew, and even later in the 
day, when the dewless grass was still fresh enough 
to have a gleam of its own. 

For my own part I prefer a winter walk that 
takes in the nightfall and the intense silence that 
erelong follows it. The evening lamps look yel- 
lower by contrast with the snow, and give the win- 
dows that hearty look of which our secretive fires 
have almost robbed them. The stars seem 

*' To hang, like twinkling winter lamps, 
Among the branches of the leafless trees," 

or, if you are ©n a hill -top (whence it is sweet to 
watch the home-lights gleam out one by one), they 
look nearer than in summer, and appear to take a 
conscious part in the cold. Especially in one of those 



A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER 109 

stand-stills of the air that forebode a change of 
weather, the sky is dusted with motes of fire of 
which the summer-watcher never dreamed. Win- 
ter, too, is, on the whole, the triumphant season of 
the moon, a moon devoid of sentiment, if you 
choose, but with the refreslnnent of a purer intel- 
lectual light, — the cooler orb of middle life. Who 
ever saw anything to match that gleam, rather di- 
vined than seen, which runs before her over the 
snow, a breath of light, as she rises on the infinite 
silence of winter night ? High in the heavens, 
also she seems to bring out some intenser property 
of cold with her chilly polish. The poets have in- 
stinctively noted this. When Goody Blake impre- 
cates a curse of perpetual chill upon Harry Gill, 
she has 

" The cold, cold moon above her head " ; 

and Coleridge speaks of 

" The silent icicles, 
Quietly gleaming to the quiet moon." 

As you walk homeward, — for it is time that we 
should end our ramble, — you may perchance hear 
the most impressive sound in nature, unless it be 
the fall of a tree in the forest during the hush of 
summer noon. It is the stifled shriek of the lake 
yonder as the frost throttles it. Wordsworth has 
described it (too much, I fear, in the style of Dr. 
Armstrong) : — 

*' And, interrupting oft that eager game, 

From under Esthwaite's splitting fields of ice, 
The pent-up air, struggling to free itself, 
Gave out to meadow-grounds and hills a loud 



110 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER 

Protracted yelling, like the noise of wolves 
Howling in troops along the Bothnie main." 

Thoreau (unless the English lakes have a differ- 
ent dialect from ours) calls it admirably well a 
*' whoop." But it is a noise like none other, as 
if Demogorgon were moaning inarticulately from 
under the earth. Let us get within doors, lest we 
hear it again, for there is something bodeful and 
uncanny in it. 



NOTES 

A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL 

PageI 

Maine was still a province : Maine, named " The Province 
or Countie of Mayne " in the charter g^ranted by Charles I, 
was acquired by Massachusetts in 1691, and did not become a 
separate state untU 1820, 

Virgil's Cumaean : arriving in Italy, ^neas went at once 
to the Cuniiean Sibyl, and from her begged permission to visit 
his father in the lower world. The lake, on the shores of which 
he was to offer sacrifice before descending, is thus described 
by Virgil : 

" There was a cavern deep with yawning jaws 
Enormous, stony, screened by a gloomy lake 
And shadowy woods : no winged thing could fly 
Unscathed above it, such the baleful breath 
That from the opening rose to the upper air." 

uE7ieid, VI, 294-298, Cranch's translation. 

that of Scott's Caledonian Lady : Loch Katrine. Cf . The 
Lady of the Lake. 

Kenelm Digby (1(503-1665) : an English philosopher, — es- 
pecially a student of the occult sciences. 

Empedocles: a Greek philosopher (490-430?) living in 
Sicily, He is said to -have thrown himself into the crater of 
^tna, so that, having thus suddenly disappeared, the people 
might believe him to be a god. Cf . Matthew Arnold's drama, 
Empedocles on Etna. 
Page 2 

Cousin Bull : John Bull ; applied to any Englishman. 

Jonathan : Brother Jonathan ; applied to any American. 
Cf. Lowell's Biglow Papers. 

Macheath : the hero of Gay's The Beggar'' s Opera. 
Page 3 

Horatian indifference: in contrast to Hamlet, Horatio 
takes with the same equanimity both the favors and the 
rebuffs of fortune. 

nunc dimittis : the first two words of the Latin canticle of 
Simeon, beginning "Now lettest thou thy servant depart in 
peace." Cf. Luke ii, 29-32. 
Page 4 

Pincian : the hill in the northern section of Rome, from 
which is to be seen toward the west the famous view of St. 
Peter's and of the Campagna beyond. 

Taocred : one of the heroes of Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered. 
By the "Mystery of the Orient" Lowell may refer to the 
maiden warrior, Clorinda, whom Taucred first met in the dis- 
guise of her white armor. She appeared and disappeared fre- 



112 NOTES 

quently afterward, fightii^ with the Pagan forces, and always 
Tancred pursued her to gain her love. Finally, in a battle 
where she dressed in a black armor instead, Tancred unknow- 
ingly killed her. The whole story may be read in Book XII. 
Eumenides : in Greek mythology the avengers of evil- 
doing. This form is euphemistic for Erinyes^ and is equivalent 
to the Latin Furiae or Dirae, 
Page 7 

four rivers of Paradise : ef. Milton's Paradise Lost, II, 
577-581. 

** Abhorred Styx, the flood of deadly hate; 
Sad Acheron of sorrow, black and deep ; 
Cocj'tus, named of lamentation loud 
Heard on the rueful stream ; fierce Plilegethon, 
Whose waves of torrent fire inflame with rage." 

Pied Piper of Hamelin : the Pied Piper, according to the 
mediaeval legend, freed the town of Haraehi from a plague 
of rats by playing so enchantingly upon his pipe that the 
animals followed him to the river and were drowned. See 
Browning's Pied Piper of Hamelin. 

Pages 

Sorbonists : the Sorbonne was founded in 1252, an institu- 
tion connected with the University of Paris, and afterwards 
absorbing into itself the whole theological faculty of the Uni- 
versity. Dming the Middle Ages and the Reformation period 
the Sorbonne was considered one of the highest authorities 
of the Christian church, and its decisions were appealed to in 
all theological controversies. 

Page 9 

Shenstone, William : English poet (1714-1763). The lines 
referred to were written by him on the window of an inn : 

" Whoe'er has travell'd life's dull round, 
Wliere'er his stages may have been, 
May sigh to think he still has found 
The warmest welcome at an inn." 

Johnson, Samuel : English critic, essayist, poet (1709-1784); 
the dominant, and the domineering, figure in English litera- 
ture in the last half of the eighteeiith century. Before quoting 
Shenstone's stanza Johnson had said : " There is nothing which 
has yet been contrived by man by which so much happiness 
is produced as by a good tavern or inn." Boswell's Johnson, 
Vol. VI, Chap, iii (London Edition, 1835). 

skull of Yorick; the skull of Yorick, the king's jester, is 
apostrophised by Hamlet : " Alas, poor Yorick ! 1 knew him, 
Horatio : a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy ; he 
hath borne me on his back a thousand times ; and now, how 
abhorred in my imagination it is ! my gorge rises at it. Here 
hung those lips that I have ki.ss'd I know not hoAv oft. Where 
be your gibes now ? your gambols ? your songs ? your flashes 
of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar ? Not 
one now, to mock your own grinning? quite chap-fallen?" 
Hamlet, V, i. 
Page 10 

Tityrus-like : Tityrus was a common shepherd's name 
among the Greeks. Virgil, in his first Eclogue, takes this name 



NOTES 113 

to himself. Spenser speaks of Chaucer thus in his Shepherd'' s 

Calendar : 

" Goe, lyttle calendar I thou hast a free passeporte ; 
Goe but a lowly gate emongste the meaner sorte : 
Dare not to match thy pype with Tityrus hia style." 

vetturino; driver. 
Page U 

Procrustean : Procrustes, a robber famous in Greek legend, 
made a bed upon wbich he tortured his victims by stretching 
those who were too short to fit it, and cutting off to the proper 
length the limbs of tbose who were too long. 
Page l.i 

island of Capri : this beautiful island, some twenty miles 
south of Naples, is in outline high and abrupt at either end, 
Monte iSolaro being nearly 2000 feet high. 
Page 14 

Hellespont : named for Helle, of Greek legend, who, es- 
caping from the wrath of her stepmother on the back of the 
ram of the golden fleece, fell into the strait between Europe 
and Asia. 

Peloponnesus : the island of Pelops, grandson of Zeus. 
Page 15 

Canning: so Carlyle in Heroes anrf Hero- Worship: "King 
is Kon-ning, Kan-ning, man that knows or cans.^' 
Page 10 

auspex : the Roman priest who read the auguries from the 
examination of the birds slain for that pui'pose. 
Page 17 

Dodo : a practically extinct species of pigeon, surviving in 
the Botany Bays, outsku-ts or regions of banishment. The 
real Botany Bay is an inlet on the coast of New South Wales 
where England once established a penal colony. 
Page 19 

Columbaria : dovecotes. 

Juan Fernandez : the island in the South Seas where lived 
for four years Selkirk, the Scottish sailor, who was supposed 
to be the original of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. 
Page 21 

Pretorian bands : the Roman emperors' body-guard ; insti- 
tuted by Augustus, and later of power enough to make and 
unmake emperors. The history of Sejanus is a dramatic illus- 
tration of their power. 

Janizaries : bodies of Turkish infantry, constituting the 
Sultan's body-guard, and the main standing army ; a turbulent 
body that often seized entire control of the government. When 
Constantine abolished the Pretorian guards. Sultan Mahmoud 
followed his example and suppressed the Janissaries. 

Mamelukes : a corps of Esryptian cavalry, whose chiefs 
were, from the thirteenth until the eighteenth century, the 
sovereign rulers of the country. 

Napoleon III: he chose i)ecember 2, 1851, the anniver- 
sary of Austerlitz and Napoleon I's coronation, to dispose of 
the National Assembly by force and to make himself absolute 
ruler. Althon<rh he was chosen by a large vote as President 
in the same year, and given the imperial title a year later, yet 
the day of tyranny was past, and the rest of his life was spent 



114 NOTES 

in trying to maintain his rule over the liberty-loving spirit of 
France. 
Page 22 

Nemesis : in mythology Nemesis was the goddess of retri- 
bution. 

nous : intellect, understanding. 
Page 2H 

Welt-schmerz : pessimism. 
Page 24 

nil admirari : to wonder at nothing. 

Tatar: Chinese. 

Johannes Taurus : Latin for John Bull. 
Page 25 

Cardinal Kichelieu : celebrated French statesman (1585- 
1642). and principal minister of Louis XIII. 

Pre-Raphaelite : the brotherhood of English artists which 
took this name originally consisted of Holman Hunt, Rossetti, 
and Millais ; it had for its object " an entire adherence to the 
simplicity of nature." 

Lethe : the river of oblivion in Hades. 
Page 26 

basia: feasium, a hiss. 

wongen: Chaucer has wonyng for "dwelling." Of. Pro- 
logue, 606. 

James Watt: the English inventor (1736-1819), who, as a 
boy, holding a spoon over the nose of a boiling kettle, dis- 
covered the power of steam. 
Page 27 

classic Everett : Edward Everett (1794-1865), a famous 
Massachusetts statesman and orator. 
Page 29 

Thundering Legion: according to legend, a Christian 
legion in the army of Marcus Aurelius, whose praj^ers for rain 
were answered by a thunder shower whose lightning killed 
the enemy while its rain refreshed the Romans. 

Batavian elixir : East India rum from Batavia, a Dutch 
port on the northern coast of Java. 
Page .31 

Napier : the famous Scotch mathematician (1550-1617), who 
invented logarithms. 
Page 32 

laudari a laudato : to be praised by one who is himself 
praised. 

Helen : according to one version of mythology, Helen was 
the daughter of Zeus and Leda, the swan. 

Merlin : the prince of enchanters. His mother was a nun, 
and, according to Geoffrey of Monmouth, his father a "guile- 
ful sprite," or an incubus, " half angel and half man, dwelling 
in mifl-air between the earth and moon." 

&va^ auSpwv: king of men, the Homeric epithet for Zeus. 

A. M. : Master of Arts : LL. D. : Doctor of Laws. 
Page 33 

St. Mark : these four horses were brought from Constanti- 
nople to adorn the middle arch of the entrance to the basilica 
of St. Mark's. In Constantinople they had possibly topped a 
Roman triumphal arch. 



NOTES 115 

Colleoni: the splendid equestrian statue of this famous 
Italian general stands before San Giovanni e Paolo.* 
sierra : the Spanish word for mountain ran<^e. 
Zeus: cf. Iliad, Bk. XXII, 271-275 (Pope's translation): 

" Jove lifts the balances that show 
Tiie fates of mortal men, and things below : 
Here each contending hero's lot he tries, 
And weighs, with equal hands, their destinies." 
Page 38 

salle-a-manger : dining-room. 
Page 40 

Hincks, Edward: an Irish Egyptologist (1792-1 86B). 
Rawimson, Sir Henry : a famous English archaeologist 
(1810-18Vt5), renowned for having deciphered the cuneiform 
inscription at Behistung which related in three different lan- 
guages the events of the reign of Darius. 

ruins of Nimroud : a rich field of ruins for the archaeolo- 
gist to study ; about 20 miles south of Nineveh. 

Greek Kalends : Kalends being the first of the month in 
the Roman calendar, the phrase "in the Greek Kalends" is 
equivalent to never. 
Page 41 

selva selvaggia : a savage wilderness. 

forest of Arden: an English forest in Warwickshire ; Lowell 
is obviously thinking of it as described (?) by Shakespeare in 
As You Like It. 

Agassiz, Louis : a famous naturalist, especially an ichthy- 
ologist (1807-187:i). See AVhittier's The Prayer of Agassiz. 

St. Jerome (345-420 ?) : his chief work was done in Rome, 
where by his example of piety and asceticism, he won many 
followers. The foundation of his greatest fame rests upon his 
critical revision of the Latin translation of the Bible, begun 
in Rome and finished in Bethlehem. 



MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE 

Page 45 

White's : Gilbert Wliite (1720-1793) ; curate at Selborne, 
England, where he wrote his one famous book. 

Oriel : one of the colleges of Oxford University. 

Barrington, Pennant : characters in White's Natural His- 
tory of Selborne. 

Walton, Izaak (1593-1683): the author of The Compleat 
Angler, of which Lamb said, " It would sweeten a man's tem- 
per at any time to read it ; it would christianize every dis- 
cordant angry passion." 

Cowper, William (1731-1800) : best known by his Olney 
Hymns and The Task. In the latter we find the lines : 

" I would not enter on my list of friends 
(Though graced with polished manners and fine sense, 
Yet wanting sensibility) the man 
Who needlessly sets foot upon a worm." 

Page 46 

"Annihilating all that's made," etc.: quoted from The 
Garden, by Andrew Marvell (1620-1678). 



116 NOTES 

Burgoyne : the English general who surrendered to the 
American forces at Saratoga, October 17, 1777. 

Chartreuse : the original, La Grande Chartreuse, is a fa- 
mous monastery in France. Lowell uses the word here to 
mean the equally sequestered home of Gilbert White, where 
he lived as secluded a life as any monk. 
Page 47 

Willoughby, Kay : two famous English naturalists, who 
were contemporaries of White. 
Page 48 

Windsor Castle : the royal residence of the English court. 
Diogenes : the Greek Cynic philosopher, living about 350 
B. c, who is reputed to have lived in a tub. 
Page 50 

Mercury, standing a-tiptoe: the pose of the beautifiu 
Mercury, by Giovanni di Bologna, in the Bargello at Flor- 
ence. 

Barabas: the Jew of Malta in Marlowe's play by that 
name, from which the following line is quoted. 
Page 51 

M. C. : member of Congress. 

cloaca maxima : the chief drain of ancient Rome. 
memoires pour servir : notes for reference. 
By nature knew he, etc. : cf . Chaucer's Nun's Priesfs 
Tale, 11. 35, 36. 
Page 52 ,^ , , o 

So nature pricketh, etc. : the line actually reads, ' So 
pricketh hem nature in hir eorages ; " cf . Chaucer's Prologue, 
1. 11. 
Page 53 

this summer : the date of this essay is given as 1869, but 
it evidently was not finished in that year. 
Emerson's Titmouse : 

" For well the soul if stout within, 
Can arm impregnably the skin." 

Bloomfield, Robert (1766-1823) : an English shoemaker and 
poet, best known for his poem. The Farmer^ s Boy. 
Page 54 

Poor Richard : the pseudonym under which Benjamin 
Franklin printed his Almanac ; the ethics of Poor Richard are 
somewhat on the " reward of merit " order, and have material 
prosperity always in view. 

Dr. Johnson's: Dr. Samuel Johnson (1709-1 7S4), the Eng- 
lish poet and essayist. Cf. Macaulay's Essay on Johnson: 
" Being often very hungry when he sat down to his meals, he 
contracted a habit of eating with ravenous greediness. Even 
to the end of his life, and even at the tables of the great, the 
sight of food affected him as it affects wild beasts and birds 
of prey." 

White Hills : the White Mountains. Cf . Hawthorne's title, 
Tales of the White Hills. 

Argos : principal city of Argolis, Greece ; here used for the 
entire country. 
Page 55 

spies, as did the Jews : cf . Numbers viii, 15. 



NOTES 117 

Wellington, Arthur Wellesley, Duke of (1769-1852) : he 
made his early reputation fighting with the Portuguese against 
the French. 
Page 56 

Pecksniffs : Pecksniff is the notorious hypocrite in Dick- 
ens's Martin Chuzzlewit. 
Page 58 

Watts, Dr. Isaac (1674-1748): English hymn-writer and 
author. 

" To their unguarded nest," etc. : cf. Shakespeare's iZenry 
F, I, ii. 
Page (50 

JEsop : according to tradition, a Greek fabulist of the sixth 
centiu-y B. c. 
Page 61 

crow-blackbirds : see in The Biglow Papers : 

" Fust come the blackbirds clatt'rin' in tall trees, 
An' settlin' things in windy Congresses." 

Shady Hill : the Cambridge home of Charles Eliot Norton. 
Page 62 

Saint Preux : the lover of Juhe in Rousseau's novel. La 
Nouvelle Helo'ise. 
Kanakas : the aborigines of the Hawaiian Islands. 
Page 63 

Edward B. Hale : the author of The Man without a Coun- 
try, and many other stories and papers ; the friend of Lowell, 
and author of James Russell Lowell and his Friends. 
Page 64 

rapture of music : compare the charming lines in Sunthin* 
in the Pastoral Line : 

" June's bridesmaid, poet of the year, 
Gladness on wings, the bobolink is here.'' 

Page 65 

Opodeldoc, etc. : cf. Bryant's refrain in his Robert of Lin- 
coln. 

Figaro : a gay, lively character in several plays of Beaumar- 
chais. 

Gurowski (1805-1866) : a Polish writer, long a resident of 
the United States, and once employed as translator in the 
State Department at Washington. 

Dixon, William Hepworth (1821-1879): an English jour- 
nalist. 

Chateaubriand : see note, p. 82. 

Fontanes, Marquis Louis de (1757-1821) : a French politi- 
cian and poet. 

mes chevaux, etc. : my horses grazing at a distance. 
Page 68 

Sweet Auburn : Lowell refers to the beautiful cemetery 
on the edge of Cambridge and Watertown, and is echoing the 
beginning of Goldsmith's Deserted Village : 

" Sweet Auburn, loveliest village of the plain." 

Eheu, fugaces : Alas, they are fled ! The quotation is from 
Horace's Odes, II, 14, " Eheu ! fugaces labuntur anni." 



118 NOTES 

Page 69 

Fresh Pond : one of Lowell's favorite walks ; not far 
from "fSweet Auburn." See note, p. G8. 

gypsies of Ell an go wan : in Scott's novel, Guy Mannering. 

Longfellow's verse: cf. Longfellow's The Herons of Elm- 
wood. 

trouvaille : a find, — a God-send. 

Kidd's treasure: Captain William Kidd was a notorious 
pirate, whose treasure is still occasionally sought. 
Page 70 

"Wilson's thrush : named for Alexander Wilson (1766-1813), 
a Scotch- American ornithologist. 

the Ancient Mariner : cf . Coleridge's poem for the pas- 
sages Lowell has in mind. 

Trasteverina : a dweller across the Tiber. 
Page 71 

Ovid : See note on p. 83. 

Penn-treaty : a fair division, and a laissez-faire policy, such 
as William Penn made with the Indians. 
Page 72 

Hebraism : Lowell uses the word here as a synonym for 
Christian religion. "The uppermost idea with Hebraism is 
conduct and obedience." Matthew Arnold. 

Medford rum : from Medf ord, on the Mystic River, eastern 
Massachusetts. 

A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER 
Page 75 

Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822) : English poet, among 
whose greatest poems are Prometheus Unbound, Alastor, 
Adonais, To a Skylark, Ode to the West Wind, etc. ; a lover 
of beauty, as is suggested by the quotation which Lowell uses 
here. 
Page 77 

Tupper, Martin C1810-1S89) : an English poet, whose chief 
work was entitled Proverbial Philosophy. It had at first a cer- 
tain popularity, but before long its writer was the butt of the 
critics, and his name was a synonym for the commonplace. 
Page 79 

Lamartine, Alphonse de (1790-1869) : a French writer, whose 
four volumes of poetry strike a monotonous note of almost 
morbid sentimentality and meditativeness. This was in poetry 
his only note ; and although generously praised at first, even in 
his lifetime he was eclipsed by the vigorous school of Victor 
Hugo. 

Heine, Heinrich (1799-1856) : the greatest figure in German 
literatvire after Goethe and Schiller : most wonderful in his 
lyrics, which are often full of pathos. He has been called the 
'' prophet of poetic pain," into whose soul the Weltschmerz had 
eaten deeply. 
Page 80 

Rousseau, Jean Jacques (1712-1778) : a French philosopher, 
the tendency of whose thought was toward condemning civ- 
ilization as tending toward a corruption of morals, and advo- 
cating a return to natiu'e. 



NOTES 119 

Petrarch, Francesco (1304-1374) : the great Italian lyric poet 
from whom the Renaissance received one of ^^s most powertul 
impilses His fame rests chiefly upon the Sonnets dedicated to 
Liura Chaucer says of his Clerk's Tale that it was 
•' Lenied at Padowe of a worthy clerk, 
Fraunceys Petrark, the laureat poete, 
Highte this clerk, whose rhethorike swete 
Eiilumined al Itaille of poetrye." 

Mont Ventoux : a peak of the Alps in southeastern France. 

^''''^ Clerk's Tale : one of The Canterbury Tales, told by the clerk 

^'^Claude'Lorrain (1600-1682): a French landscape painter 
wlfole canvasel are remarkable for their careful arrangement 
Tnd defiSn^ss of detail, and for the sense of unlimited space 

%ll^:tT&:. (1615?-1673): a painter of the Neapolitan 
school who excelled in terrible battle pieces, and whose land- 
scapes Tre always composed of gloomy grottoes rocky preei- 
p^ceTshattered trees, and enveloped in an atmosphere of 

^'Splr'poussin (1613-1675): a French W^^ P^jj^^-^ 
who eloried in portraying wind and storm, and the darkness 
Tf whose canvasJs has been only intensified by the lapse of time. 

^^"""^ Thomson, James (1700-1748) : an English poet, whose great- 
est poem. The Seasons, is refreshing in its expression ot piea- 
sure^?nThe simple things of nature. Wordsworth says further 
of him : 

" Expedients, too, of simplest sort he tried : 
Long blades of grass, plucked round him as he lay, 
Made, to his ear attentively applied, 
A pipe on which the wind would deftly play; 
Glasses he had, that little things display, 
The beetle panoplied in gems and gold, 
A mailed angel on a battle day; 
The mysteries that cups of flowers enfold. 
And all the gorgeous sights which fairies do behold. 

St Pierre, Bernardin (1737-1814): a French writer, best 
known as the author of Paul etVirginie. 

Cowper : see note on p. 45. His greatest work, The iask, 
is in simplicity of theme and style far removed from formal- 
ty and convention. In Book I of this work appears the oft- 
quoted line which expresses the spirit of his thought, 
"God made the country, and man made the town." 

Chateaubriand, Frangois (1768-1848) : a French writer of 
some note. Although he produced no single book that can be 
called an enduring work of art, his prose ,s wonderful fox its 
power of conveying the beauty and mystery of natme He is 
sometimes called ^ The Father of the K^^^.^^^^^ ^fi.*i^J-p>,^^J 
had all the sentimentalism of Rousseau, and he claimed Byron 

^' Wordsworth, WiUiam (1770-18^50): among all English 
poets he is the great interpreter of Nature. Lowell evidently 



120 NOTES 

had in mind here his greater poems. The Prelude and The 
Excursion, in which one reads Wordsworth's faith in Nature 
as a kindly teacher, chastening and inspiring thoughtful 
men. 

Byron, George Gordon, Lord (1788-1824) : the English revo- 
lutionary poet, whose power of describing nature may well be 
seen in Childe Harold'' s Pilgrimage, Canto III. 

George Sand (1804-1876) : nom de plume of Baroness Dude- 
vant. A French novelist, in some of whose books. La Petite 
Fadette, for example, written while she was living quietly in 
the country at Berry, is to be found that idyllic portrayal of 
nature of which Lowell is speaking. 

Ruskin, John (1819-1900) : English essayist and critic, whose 
appreciations of the modern landscape painters in Modern 
Painters are in themselves great word pictures. 

lettre de cachet : a royal warrant. 

Bussy Rabutin, Roger de, Comte de Bussy (1618-1693): 
a French officer and author, whose Memoires and Lettres are 
diverting reading. 
Page 83 

Menage: Lowell probably refers to Gilles Manage (1613- 
1692), the famous French philologist. In his Me'nagiana might 
be found such a passage as Lowell speaks of here. 

"Wedgewood, Thomas : life-long friend and benefactor of 
Coleridge. 

Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso, 43 B. C.-18 A. D.) : a Roman 
poet, best known as author of Metamorphoses, who was exiled 
to Pontus about 9 A. d. 
Page 84 

Jubinal, Achille, French critic, and collector and editor of 
Nouveau recueil de contes, dits, et fabliaux, etc. 
Page 85 

Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus, 65-8 b. c.) : a Roman 
poet, best known for his Satires and Odes (Carmina). The 
quotation here reads, translated : " Heap high the wood upon 
the hearth and drive away the cold." Cf. Carmen IX, Ad 
Thaliarchum. 

Roderick Random : a novel by Tobias Smollett, published 
in 1748. Lowell refers here to the scene at the inn described 
in chapter x. 

Walton : see note on p. 45. 

Cotton, Charles (1630-1687): an English poet, who furnished 
a second part, on fly fishing, to the fifth edition of Walton's 
Compleat Angler, in 1676. 

Foot-note : But you. Winter, are full of snow, wind, rain, 
and liail ; you deserve to be )3anished as an exile ; to speak 
without flattery, plainly, Winter, you are nothing better than 
a villain. 

Charles d'Orleans (1391-1465), the last of the mediaeval 
poets ; friend of Villon ; composer of many charming rondels. 
Page 86 

Doctor Akenside (1721-1770) : an English poet, best known 
by his Pleasures of the Imagination. 
Page 87 

Fallor ? an et nobis, etc. : cf . Milton's Latin epigram, In 
Proditionem Bombardicam. 



NOTES 121 

Goethe (1749-1832) : German poet, dramatist, and prose 
•writer ; the greatest name in German literature. Harz-reise 
im Winter: A Journey through the Harz Mountains in Winter. 
PageSH 

Newton, John (1725-1807) : Cowper's beloved pastor, who 
helped him in preparing and publishing the Olney Hymns in 
1779. 
Page 89 , . , . , 

handy Latinism : both in the conception explained m the 
preceding lines and in the use of the term inverted. ^ 

ehsion : of the e in the and the i in inverted., making the and 
in one syllable. 

Gray , Thomas (1716-1771) : Gray's love of the " handy Latin- 
ism " is shown more in his odes than in the Elegy. 
Page 91 

consulate of the second Adams : John Quincy Adams 
(1767-1848) ; sixth President, and the son of the second Presi- 
dent, John Adams. Hence, " consulate of the second Adams." 

late laureate : Wordsworth was poet laureate from 1843 
until his death, in 1850. 

Dean Swift, Jonathan (1667-1745) : English satirist, author 
of Gulliver's Travels, Tale of a Tub. The Battle of the Books, etc. 

skating-scene in the " Prelude " : cf . Book I, 425-463. 

Crabb Robinson (1775-1867) : friend of Wordsworth, Lamb, 
Goethe, and others, allusions to whom fill his Diary, Remi- 
niscences, and Correspondence, and give us some of our best 
glimpses of their personalities. 

General Fevrier : General February. 
PAge 92 

Grahame, James (1765-1811) : author of Wallace., a Tra- 
gedy. 

digging out paths : cf . Snow-Bound, 11. 66-80. 

verses of Emerson : cf . The Snow-Storm. 

tristis Hiems : the severe winter. 

Barbe Fleurie : flowery beard. 
Page 93 

Gherardo deUa Notte : Gerard Honthorst (1592-1662), a 
Dutch painter, called Gherardo della Notte on account of his 
fondness for painting night scenes. 

bourgeois : something common, vulgar. 

J. H. : Lowell refers here to John Holmes, younger brother 
of the poet, who was a member of the famous whist club 
whose records were so faithfully kept by Lowell. Its most 
constant members were Mr. Lowell, Mr. Holmes, Mr. John 
Bartlett, compiler of Familiar Quotations, and Dr. Estes 
Howe, who married Lowell's sister. 

Mrs. Battles : cf . Lamb's Essay, Mrs. BattWs Opinions on 
Whist. Her rule for the game was, *' A clear fire, a clean 
hearth, and the rigor of the game." Lamb's name is Battle not 
Battles. 

Euroclydon : the northeast wind ; usually called Euraquilo, 
but cf. Acts xxvii, 14 {Revised Version). 

" tumultuous privacy " : cf . Emerson's The Snow-Storm, 1. 9. 
Page 94 

" Great things doeth He," etc. : cf. Job xxxvii, 5. 
Judd's "Margaret" : Sylvester Judd (1813-1853), a New 



122 NOTES 

England clergyman, whose Margaret is a romance not so widely 
read as it deserves to be. 
Page 95 

Chapman, George (1559-1634) : an English poet, best known 
for his translation of Homer. Cf . Keats's On First Looking 
into Chapman's Homer. 

Pope, Alexander (1688-1744): the English poet, author of 
Essay on Criticism, The Rape of the Lock, The Dunciad, Essay 
on Man, etc., who worked from 1713 to 1725 on his translation 
of Homer. 

Martial (43-104) : the Latin poet from one of whose epi- 
grams this line is quoted: "The thick fleece of the silent 
snowflakes." 

Dr. Donne, John (1573-1631) : English poet. The writings 
of Donne and his school were distinguished by fantastic turns 
of thought and phrase, sometimes happy and sometimes la- 
bored. The internal rhyme of tacitarum and aquarum is a 
device which would have pleased him. 

Eustathius of Thessalonica : a Greek classical scholar of 
the twelfth century, whose commentary on Homer did much 
toward testing the genuineness of the text of his writings. 

Godeau Antoine (1605-1672) : a French poet, whom Mme. 
de Sevign^ called " le plus bel esprit de son temps." 

Lorsque la f roidure, etc. When the inhuman cold robs the 
forests of their green beauty, it covers the fallow fields under 
thick snow, and the snow holds for them all the warmth of wool. 
Page 96 

" doth pluck the masoned turrets " : cf. The Two Noble 
Kinsmen, V, i. 

Cowley, Abraham (1618-67) : although considered even 
greater as a poet than Milton in his own day, he has steadily 
decreased in estimation ; but he may still be wondered at for 
his ingenuity and skilfulness in fancy and phrase. 

Notre Dame de la Neige : Our Lady of the Snow. 
Page 97. 

Phidias's journeyman : probably Lowell has in mind either 
Alcamenes, who was the most skilful of the pupils of Phidias 
and the artist of the centaur conflict on the west pediment of 
the Temple of Zeus at Olympia, or Agoracritus, who was the 
favorite pupil of Phidias. 

Poseidon : the god of sea storms. 
Page 98 

Bedouins : the nomadic Arabs in distinction from those who 
dwelt in towns. 

honest Jacques : among the French, Jacques Bonhomme 
is a general name for a peasant. 
Page 99 

" Chanticleer shook off the powthery snaw " : cf . Burns's 
A Winter Night, IX. 

Ambrose Philips (1671-1749): an English writer, best known 
as the author of The Distrest Mother. He was nicknamed 
" Namby-Pamby," and the jealousy of Pope, who had already 
praised his "eminence in the infantile style," saw to it that 
the name clung to him. 
Page 100 

"glorified sugar-candy " : " The boxes at that time, full 



NOTES 123 

of well-dressed women of quality, projected over the pit ; and 
+LT.il asters reaching down were adorned with a glistening 
suLtance Tknow not what) under glass (as it seemed), resem- 
hW - a homely fancy - but I judged it to be sugar-candy - 
yet to my raised imagination, divested of its homelier quali- 
t£, it appeared a glorified candy ! " Lamb's essay, My tirst 

^tI'vys Samuel (1033-1705): famous as the author of the 
DiarVmTm), which is one of the chief authorities on the 
period of the Restoration. 
^""""^ Pentelicus : a mountain near Athens, famous for its marble 
Sisvphean toil : Sisyphus the cratty was condemned forever 
to roU up hiU a huge stone, which at the top always rolled 
down again. Cf. Pope's translation of the Odyssey, Bk. Xi. 

•' With many a weary step and many a groan, 
Up the high hill he heaves a huge round stone , 
The huge round stone, returning with a bound, 
ThLders impetuous down, and smokes along the ground. 

Cf. also Ovid's Metamorphoses, TV. 

^-^Zrnante(l^^^^^^^^^^ 

^h: bSt ^y^MidLd «?' The Court of the Loggia of the 

^^slro^ino'ruTU : a Tuscan sculptor and architect 

diSfn^xthed himself at Hohenlinden, Wagram Aspern etc^ 
Ball's Bluff: Lowell refers here to William LoweU Futnam, 

second lieutenant of the 20th Massachusetts regiment. 

FrirOaks: LoweU refers here to James Jackson Lowell, 

^"cSr'Jreek: Lowell refershere to General CW^^^^^^ 
Towell his nephew. In Scudder's James Russell Lowell ^nd 

account of the part these men played m the Uvil W ar. 

Vauban (1633-1707 : a famous French f.n&i"f ^; ^^^^ 
strengthened many of the fortresses on the frontiers of France, 
Wdls dStinguishing himself by conducting sieges and build- 
ing fortitS- durLg the wars between fr-ce a-<i S^ai^^^ 

Vermont sculptor: probably Lowell refers here to Hiram 

^°'^0 'that I were a mockery-king," etc. : cf . King Richard 
II, IV, i. 
^''''^ SUberhorn: one of the Swiss Alps, near the Jungfrau. 

a1t»1i • see Coleridge's Kubla Khan, U. 1-5. ^ . . oi i 
Titania OberoS : king and queen of the fairies in Shake- 
speare's Midsummer Night's Dream. 
Page 106 

Agassiz : see note on p. 41 • 



124 NOTES 

Piranesi, Giovanni (1720-1778): a Roman engraver. His 
finest work was the engraving of some 2000 plates illustrating 
the antiquities and public buildings of Rome. 

Thoreau, Henry David (1817-lb62) : the Concord naturalist, 
friend of Emerson. 
Page 107 

Moretum : a short poem, usually attributed to Virg^, al- 
though its authorship is doubtful. 
Page 108 

pot-au-f eu : boiled meat and broth. 
Page 109 

Goody Blake : cf . Wordsworth's Goody Blake and Harry 
Gill : her curse was 

" God ! who art never out of hearing, 
O may he never more be warm ! " 

and the result was 

" That evermore his teeth they chatter, 
Chatter, chatter, chatter etill ! " 

Dr. Armstrong, Jol\n (1709-1779) : an English physician 
and poet, his principal work being The Art of Preserving 
Health, — a didactic poem in four books, whose style may be 
easily imagined. 

" And, interrupting oft that eager game," etc.: cf. The 
Prelude, Book I, 538-543. 
Page 110 

Demogorgon : the tyrant of the elves and fays. Spenser 
says he " dwells in the deep abyss where the three fatal sisters 
dwell." Faerie Queene, IV, 2. 



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